How to Leverage Your Employees as Influencers

According to my brand affinity model for influencer marketing, your employees are those that naturally have the most brand affinity for your company because they are an organic part of it. How, though, do you activate your employees as influencers? How does this relate to the concept of employee advocacy? How would this work in regulated industries? And are there any analogies to leveraging employees as influencers that you see in influencer marketing today?

Key Highlights

[02:48] Engaging Employees As Influencers
[03:31] How Influencers Are Categorized?
[05:44] Entities That Have Most Brand Affinity
[06:43] The Way of Looking At Employee Influence
[13:26] Why You Should Treat Your Employees Better
[15:25] How To Convert Employees Into Influencers
[16:33] Legal Issues Related To Employee Advocacy
[21:19] The Importance of Employee Influence Training
[23:14] Things That Go Into Employee Influencer Training Program
[26:49] Leveraging Employees As Part of Content Creation Process

Notable Quotes 

• They found that how you treat your employees directly impacts job satisfaction, organizational commitment, employee empowerment, supporting your supervisor, and organizational innovation.
• These what we call employee advocacy programs have turned more into employee engagement programs. In other words, you don't have to share our content. But we want you to engage with it.
• Because just like influencer marketing, we don't want to treat people like they're programmable ad units. We don't want to treat our employees as if they're automatically going to post anything and everything we share with them to their personal networks on social media.
• And by providing training, that is putting some skin in the game that if you have employees that love social media, they want to be more active, and by you helping them they'll help you, you can imagine how you're going to get a lot more attention for this program than you were if it's like, hey, share our content.

Links mentioned in the show:
Case of Taiwanese airlines: http://www.isihome.ir/freearticle/ISIHome.ir-21028.pdf
FTC calls out Sony -- and Deutsch L.A. -- for deceptive advertising: https://adage.com/article/news/ftc-sony-deutsch-la-deceived-consumers/296004
The Age of Influence: https://nealschaffer.com/ageofinfluence

Episodes mentioned in or related to this one:
165: Influencer Marketing During COVID-19: Still Worth the Investment?
123: Enterprise-Wide Employee Advocacy is a Natural Outcome of Social Business [Sociabble Interview]
121: Everything You Wanted to Know about Employee Advocacy [PostBeyond Interview]
115: How Cathay Pacific Built a Global

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