Does Employee Advocacy Really Work?

Welcome to episode 179, this week the main topic is something I seem to be coming across a lot…employee advocacy on LinkedIn. For those who haven’t come across this before, it simply means utilising the employees of a company to be ‘advocates’ of the organisation to help with marketing, sales and recruitment.

The problem is, I’m really not sure it works on LinkedIn….I will explain more later.

Interesting Stuff I Saw This Week

Artificial intelligence just made guessing your password a whole lot easier

Carl who sent this article in uses Password Safe https://pwsafe.org

I also noticed another two key people at LinkedIn have recently left the organisation. I have met many LinkedIners in my time but the one who has impressed me the most was Wade Burgess. Wade is a massive talent and will be a huge miss to LinkedIn. Keep an eye on his new employer Shiftgig, if Wade is convinced enough to join them as CEO, they are likely to be going places!

If you are listening Wade (highly unlikely) - my very best wishes for the future.

LinkedIn have also lost another key person who is highly respected. Pat Wadors was the SVP of global talent.

Both individuals were key players for LinkedIn, these must be testing times for the CEO Jeff Weiner. This got me thinking and I checked back at my connections at LinkedIn and remarkably another 10 (in addition to the above) have resigned since the announcement of the Microsoft takeover.

Employee Advocacy. Does It Really Work on LinkedIn?

I have had several conversations recently with companies who want to know how to use LinkedIn more effectively as an employee advocacy tool. This got me thinking about the whole subject and I have to say, I’m somewhat sceptical as to whether this really is a good idea on LinkedIn (possibly anywhere).

• My thoughts; Does it actually work? It seems a hot subject but I remain sceptical that is actually has any tangible benefits.
• Most content seems to be external links which are pretty much a waste of time posting on LinkedIn anyway.
• Sharing company page posts doesn’t seem to work either - company posts get very little engagement. Average figures for Cisco (number 4 in LinkedIn top company pages for 2017) are 135 likes and 3 comments and Schneider Electric (number 2) get 300 likes and 2 comments. The vast majority of likes are from employees (advocates). A comparable set of stats from a really strong personal user is 135 likes and 15 comments!
• Experts in this subject talk about providing ‘guidance’ to employees but I suspect this either puts them off being active or means they feel ‘directed’ which leads to a huge lack of authenticity.
• Why not educate employees to use LinkedIn (voluntarily) in a way that allows them to be authentic individuals and not mouth pieces for the marketing or recruitment function?
• Most companies (and advocates) are guilty of the McFly syndrome …It’s all about you!
• If employees are happy, motivated and active on LinkedIn then they will naturally be advocates. They actually don’t need to talk about the company at all…just show that they are interesting, switched on individuals.

Here is the post I did on this subject (click on it to see the comments);

You can see the LinkedIn #LifeAtSAP posts here and the #WeAreCisco posts here

These week we have a first! ….a live question recorded today!

Lorraine Bow is a Ukulele instructor based in London and has been struggling to find ways of using LinkedIn to win new clients.

She asked me to help her and this is what you can hear in the episode

You can view Lorraine’s recent activity by clicking here

Here is her original ‘Goosebumps’ post which, as you can see didn’t get much traction