How to make your employees your top influencers

By Lorraine Sauvy

What we read, see or hear within our personal and professional networks is more relevant than ever when we make choices and decisions. Creating engaging content for your employees to share is one way to make your stories heard in those networks.

Last week Comprend hosted a breakfast seminar discussing "How to make your employees your top influencers” together with the employer review community CareerEye and employee advocacy platform Smarp.

Lars Ingerslev from Smarp started the morning with a brief history lesson on how Internet and social media have changed our decision-making behaviour to us making decisions based on what we have read, seen or heard within our personal and/or professional network. For example, when was the last time you went to a restaurant without having checked it on a review site or in your network?

But it is not only in personal situations that we act this way. 50% of B2B researchers today are millennials, meaning that they will not call you if they want more information about your products or services. They will first search for information within their network and then, if you are relevant to them, contact you.

So how do you make your employees become influencers in these networks? Only 17% of the employees (globally) says being engaged at work is the key, so there is a great potential for improvement here. First, you should make sure your internal communication is engaging and relevant in order to earn an external ambassadorship from your employees.

Our own social media expert Sara Hernandez then elaborated on the importance of finding out what drives the employees’ engagement and the understanding of why and what would make them willing to share. General human drivers for sharing content in social media are:

• • Strengthen/support relationships
• • Entertain
• • Gain status and recognition
• • Show commitment

What Sara had also observed while working on several projects was that content that related to personal stories or achievements are more likely to be shared by employees rather than classic company information.

So, make sure you provide your employees with regular and relevant content that will make them look good when sharing within their network.

To get at better understanding on how to actually do this Caitriona O’Connor, Global Social Media Manager at Skanska, told their story on how fundamental employer branding and social media is used to attract and retain talents.

"We are only as good as what people say about us. Trust is the currency of our time."

- says Caitriona O’Connor, Global Social Media Manager at Skanska

Skanska has the ambitious goal to employ 30,000 people by 2020 and this is their strategy:

1. Take the lead in important areas and create shareable content.
2. Help employees become more social.  Don’t take for granted that your employees will understand social media.
3. Cover every touchpoint. All your employees' LinkedIn profiles are a place for people to explore your brand. When researching for a new job you would look up the people in your future team,  at their personal profiles, because people want to work with people, not generic corporate brands.
4. Be human. Create content about who your employees are, not just what they do.

To wrap container up the morning Maria Z Furenmo, HR director for Svenska Spel och and Lottie Knutson, communication strategist and board super star, joined our friend Tommie Cau from CareerEye on stage for a Q&A session. The key take away from this session can be boiled down to this: Be genuine and transparent.

"Don’t just show your Barbies and Kens."

- says Lottie Knutson, communication strategist and board super star

The main reason for people not changing jobs is that it’s too risky. You don’t know how it actually is inside those walls. So open up and don’t be afraid of showing imperfections. It’s rather your imperfections that will make you credible and trustworthy than a perfectly polished outside.

Learn more about how we can help you with your intranet, or get in touch with us directly.