January 9, 2017 | less than a minute read

The Curious Case of Employee Advocacy Tools

Passle

Over the past few years, a number of employee advocacy tools have risen to prominence, which is no surprise given the obvious value in the networks of a given company's employees.

This is particularly true of the C-suite execs, who usually amass a goldmine of high-value connections on their journey to seniority. But this piece from Harvard PR raises an interesting point - do employee advocacy tools foster a quantity over quality approach?

When impactful engagement strategies like gamification are thrown into the mix, do these tools risk yielding a high noise-signal ratio? Increasingly, I'm hearing that marketeers are keen for their experts to enrich the content they share with their own thoughts and opinions. After all, if you're buying an experts' knowledge as the product, wouldn't your preference be to read the expert's opinion on a piece of content, rather than just the piece alone?

Employee advocacy tools are increasingly used to encourage workers to share content, which is pre-approved by Marketing. One executive spoke about the benefits of gamifying engagement. This works by awarding points to employing for sharing content supplied by the marketing team. He acknowledged the risks of these tools making employees’ feeds too sterile and the challenges of getting people to put their own spin on the content. While employee advocacy tools can be useful, there’s a risk that they can end up eating themselves, the more popular the gamification element becomes. It’s the quality engagement that matters, not the number of shares or likes.