Building Employee Advocacy Programs through Existing Social Behavior

Cue. Routine. Reward.

Did you know that over 50% of all employees post on social media, but according to a widely cited Gallup poll, only one-third of employees worldwide are engaged at work. That's a pretty big deficit when you consider how often that same one-third is logging into Facebook, or LinkedIn, or WhatsApp during the course of their work day. 

If one of the basic intentions of an Employee Advocacy program is to leverage the natural enthusiasm of your workforce, it makes sense to launch your program with those who are most active on social.  Still, even when your content is "ah-mazing" you may find your participants aren't sharing on a consistent or even semi-regular basis.  

That's the time to unpack the Cue. Routine. Reward. approach. Essentially this means building on an already deeply embedded set of behaviors, like checking Facebook multiple times each day, and creating a new routine on top of it.

If you remember P&G's Febreze rollout several years ago, the cue approach may sound familiar.  From the New York Times:  "The process within our brains that creates habits is a three-step loop. First, there is a cue, a trigger that tells your brain to go into automatic mode and which habit to use. Then there is the routine, which can be physical or mental or emotional. Finally, there is a reward, which helps your brain figure out if this particular loop is worth remembering for the future."

Considerations for creating the desired new sharing behavior:

• Cue: Nobody wants more email so participants aren't likely to pay special attention to an email push, but not so for a mobile push via SMS or an app notification. We've all been trained to look at the shiny messages popping up on our small screens throughout the day -- that's an existing cue! If your  advocacy platform only offers email, you're already playing catch up before you got started.  Make sure you have both options available. 
  
  
• Routine: Presuming your participants responded to the small screen cue, continue building on existing behaviors by letting them share to as many of their preferred social channels as many times as they like. This includes one-to-one messaging apps which will become more important as time passes. If your platform restricts the number of times a post can be shared by a single person, or locks them out after sharing on a single day, you're doing your program a disservice. If you've already captured their attention they may very likely share something else they missed on a previous occasion. Don't limit them - empower them! Which leads us to ...
  
  
• Reward: WIFM really matters here. What's in it for me might be different than what's in it for my coworker (this takes us into a conversation about gamification that we can talk about another time), but at the very minimum, those who feel empowered to share are successfully building their personal brands as authority figures in their industry. 

I'd love to hear your thoughts. Don't hesitate to contact me if you have any questions or require a more detailed discussion about Employee Advocacy and Social Media Strategy for your organization.