The Power of Employee Advocacy with 3M & Intel

Speaker 1:
Good afternoon everybody. I hope you had a lovely lunch. This mic’s way louder than I expected. Sorry, I didn’t mean to yell. I am super excited for us to be having our breakout session on advocacy. I know advocacy is a super important part of a lot of our customers programs. We have two superstars here today to talk through what they’re doing from an advocacy perspective. So I’m really, really excited to be inviting Krista Vogel from Intel and Tiara Kesler from 3M. So please welcome to the stage, just a bit of a housekeeping before they kick off. So we will be holding Q&A at the end, so we’ll be going through the two sessions and then we’ll be holding questions for everybody to come back to once they’re completed. But kicking off with Krista, so over to

Speaker 2:
You. All right, thank you so much. Well, I’m so excited to be here today, talk all things advocacy with you all. I am going to kick us off by talking about how we’ve built community to really fuel employee advocacy at Intel. So leading up to the launch of our dynamic platform. But I’ll start with a little intro. So I’m Krista Vogel. I’m a social advocacy program manager at Intel. A few things about me. I was born and raised in Iowa. I now call Portland, Oregon home. I sit within employee communications and employer brand at Intel where I co-manage our global advocacy program office, along with my wonderful colleague Terry, and some things that I enjoy outside of work. I love hiking, traveling. My dog Parker. He’s a 12 year old malti poo. And my fiance Michael, I am marrying next May. Ooh.

Speaker 2:
All right. So just to give you a sense of what I’m going to be talking about today, I’m going to start with Intel’s advocacy evolution and kind of where we started to bring us to this point we’re at now. I’m going to talk a lot about how we launched our ambassador community as really kind of the core and the engine that starts advocacy at Intel. I’m also going to give you a little bit of context into how we’ve stood up our program office and how we’ve structured our team to really attack some exciting goals. And then finally, I’m going to talk about how we are preparing to launch our Intel share hub on the dynamic platform to all employees just in a couple of weeks. So starting with our advocacy evolution. So just to kind of set the stage, give you a little bit of context, employee advocacy at Intel used to sit within our brand marketing team and about two years ago moved into employer brand where it sits today.

Speaker 2:
So we kind of had the opportunity to take a good look at what we wanted to do with advocacy, how we needed to structure our team, the tools that we needed to make it happen and really build from there. So a few things that we learned as we got started taking on advocacy with an employer brand. The first problem statement that we identified was that less than 1% of our global employee audience was connected to our advocacy program and actively sharing content about Intel on social media. So as we kind of dug deeper and looked at what might be driving that low engagement in advocacy, there were a few key items that we identified. The first was that a lot of our employees aren’t really sure what they can share externally, where to find it or how to share it. So we knew that we needed to move toward a more positive and supported sharing culture at Intel.

Speaker 2:
The second finding was that we had some really positive pockets of advocacy across our employee audience within the regions and in some of our business units, but none of those were really connected to one another and they certainly weren’t a part of a center-led advocacy program office. So we really had this opportunity to create consistency and connection across those efforts. And then the third one, which really serves the catalyst for the ambassador community that I’m going to talk about was that we recognized we had taken kind of a one size fits all approach to advocacy in the past. We wanted employees to share content about Intel articles and things like that, mainly catering those people who weren’t very proficient at sharing yet. So we were really underserving some of our employees who were active on social and maybe needed something above and beyond that. So we knew that as we evolved this program, we needed to be able to meet employees where they are.

Speaker 2:
And again, this was really what drove the creation of our ambassador community. So as we identified our purpose in launching this pilot for the Blue Crew ambassadors was that we know we’re transforming the sharing culture at Intel through an integrated social advocacy program with a goal to meet employees where they are. We also needed to give them a clear value proposition. So what’s in it for me? Why should I share content about Intel? And so through this program, the Blue Crew Ambassadors, this was our opportunity to start building, educating and engaging that core Intel brand ambassador audience to share their own unique content and their authentic Intel stories on social media.

Speaker 2:
So where do we start? How do you start to identify those employees who might serve as great ambassadors? So as we started this, we started by focusing on employees who we saw as best positioned to lead the way as an ambassadors. So these are folks who are most likely to share stories and motivate other employees to share. And a couple of key audience pillars that we identified to get involved. First was our advocacy early adopters. So these are people who are likely already sharing at some level about Intel on social media. Maybe they’re sharing it from our Intel newsroom site for example. But they might need a little bit of help in developing their authentic voice on social and really kind of adding their own perspective to content. And we also saw an opportunity for this audience to give them some increased visibility on their content, reward some of their efforts.

Speaker 2:
And so we identified these folks through some of our advocacy resources that we already had, some of those super users, people who are helping to feed content to others across Intel. So our curators. And then we also just did some good old fashioned social media discovery. So who’s using the IM Intel hashtag in the wild, who’s engaging with our employer brand social accounts, let’s invite them in as well. And then the second pillar was our employee resource groups. So what we recognize about this audience is that a lot of our employee resource group leaders are really great at identifying and activating employees at times that matter most such as heritage months. But they needed a little bit of help in creating more of that long tail storytelling. So how do we create more consistency throughout the year and give employees more of an opportunity to create stories? So we identified this group through our ERG leaders, our leadership council members, as well as community recommendations within Intel. So what we came up with was 51 initial participants. These participants spanned 13 countries, nine business units, four ERGs and three leadership councils. So a really nice slice of our employee audience so that we could really learn what’s working, what’s not, and how do we tweak this program as we look to grow it.

Speaker 2:
So the way that we launched our ambassador program was through a three-part workshop series. So we actually partnered with an external vendor to help us design an exclusive three-part series that would help them learn practical tips for social sharing and to build those social storytelling skills. The first session, this covered about five to six months. Our first session was really focused on building the foundation, some of those basic storytelling skills, the art, science and craft of storytelling, as well as how to cater your story to various platforms. In the second session, we got really tactical learning about adding flavor to shared articles, building on one another’s post, celebrating key milestones such as an employee anniversary and then also using story prompts as inspiration to create new content. And then we wrapped it up with a third session really digging into turning what inspires you into a great story on social media. And what we saw as very clear takeaways when we surveyed employee participants was that they really understood the message we were trying to convey about sharing your personal story and your personal perspective and the value that that creates for advocacy. So we were super encouraged to see that feedback, that it was really resonating and we knew we had something here.

Speaker 2:
So there were a few things that we asked our ambassadors to do beyond the workshops. The workshops were really the core of how we launched this program, but we also asked ambassadors to follow and engage with our Blue Crew newsletter. You can see that here we provided some pre-approved content that they could share, offered them opportunities to engage with brand and executive social content, and we also provided weekly prompts for them to think about authentic stories that they could share. We encouraged these ambassadors to share two unique social posts per month to really think about utilizing the tips that they were learning. Throughout the workshop series. We had a closed Yammer community where we encouraged discussion sharing best practices, what works, here’s a post of mine that performed really well, so they could really kind of build that sense of community. And then finally, we hosted biweekly office hours to bring people together, ask questions, share those best practices and discuss social trends.

Speaker 2:
Another cool thing that we did as we launched this program was we provided swag kits to our ambassadors. So when the workshop series concluded, we sent out this kit with tools to create great social content as well as to share their Intel pride. So it included things like a microphone, a ring light, and a speaker, as well as a $25 credit to our Intel store. So again, they can share that Intel pride, and we got such a positive response from this. We encouraged participants to share on social when they received it, but the messages, again, really utilized those tips that they were learning. And it wasn’t just about the swag kit, it was about the value of this program that they were a part of. So really incredible. When we looked at just eight posts from employees in seven countries, they got about 1500 reactions on those eight posts alone. So again, just really great opportunity for employees to share and for that brand visibility as well.

Speaker 2:
So then just a few things as we think about, okay, we’re wrapping up this three part series, this pilot. Where do we go from here? How do we start to think about scaling this program so that more employees can be a part of it? So a few things that we kind of had to dig into and really think about first was that we saw social activity spike after each workshop. So people were really excited to put the tips that they were learning into action right away, but we really started to see that drop off in between workshops. So we really had to ask ourselves, how do we keep people more engaged consistently? So we encouraged more discussion on our Yammer channel. We also now preview news and awards for these ambassadors so that they can have a little bit of a heads up and plan their content accordingly and kind of be the first ones into action when those moments happen.

Speaker 2:
We also, we’re a global company. We have our global ambassador audience, so how do we create opportunities for them to engage that work within their schedule and what kind of time commitment is realistic? So we actually scaled our sessions back from 60 minutes down to about 25. So we try to keep them really bite-sized. We do them a little bit more frequently so that people can take advantage of them and of course offer them at geo friendly times. We also recognized in need to build out some on-demand resources so people can take advantage of learning about advocacy in wherever they are. I mentioned we hosted office hours. These were a great connection opportunity, often a really free flowing conversation, but we wondered how might we add some more substance into these sessions. And so a couple of things that we’ve started to do first is we’ve leveraged internal presenters to share insights in their area of expertise.

Speaker 2:
So we’ve had one of my colleagues came in and talked about creating Instagram reels. We had someone come in and share the corporate social strategy, executive social strategy. So again, just kind of giving them a peek behind the curtains of what’s happening across Intel. And then of course, we always leave time for questions and discussion to continue fostering that sense of community. We also knew that our ambassadors have this opportunity to kind of pave the way for more employees to feel comfortable sharing. And so how might we encourage more of that? And one of the ways we’ve done that is, as you see here, we’ve highlighted ambassador content on our external social channels, which are we are Intel, our employer brand accounts, and then also we feed that into that weekly newsletter that we send. So we’re highlighting those employees we’re spotlighting their efforts and encouraging more employees to get involved in the same way.

Speaker 2:
And then of course, the big question was how do we measure the impact of this advocacy? So we weren’t using dynamic at the time, and so measurement was a real gap for us. And this was really something that was the catalyst to thinking about how do we expand this program? What kind of tool are we going to need to really grow and be able to prove the value of it? So before I get into launching that program, I just want to give you at this point, we really knew that we wanted to grow and scale this ambassador community. And so we had to think about how do we structure our team to be able to support that and to ideally bring on a new platform that we needed in order to measure this impact. So we came up with our employee advocacy program office charter, which exists as kind of two halves to a hole that are interconnected and entirely necessary for one another.

Speaker 2:
The first is authentic storytelling, and that’s really where that ambassador community is the core, and then also content amplification. So how do we make it easy for employees to share content about Intel and about their Intel experience on social media? So coming out of designing what that program office looks like, of course we have to identify some key priorities that are going to move us forward and get us closer to our goal of making more employees engaged in advocacy. And so within that authentic storytelling pillar, of course the focus is really the ambassador community. How do we expand this community? How do we refine that engagement strategy to really keep people involved? And then how do we also increase visibility of our user generated content by feeding it into our employer brand channels and our internal communications as well? Within the content amplification pillar, this is really where the dynamic platform comes in.

Speaker 2:
We call it the Intel Share Hub. So our goal as we kind of designed this was to launch the new platform with a goal to make sharing easy and also a little bit fun for our employees. And of course, defining our metrics and reporting strategy so that we can show the value of advocacy across Intel. And then kind of underpinning all of that is that focus on developing some on-demand training resources so that we can kind of supplement what we’re doing with the ambassador community and those really personal and interactive workshops, but also be able to provide more employees with an opportunity to learn about and engage in advocacy.

Speaker 2:
So this brings us to introducing our new platform, which as I mentioned, we call it the Intel Share Hub and really how we’ve used ambassadors to start building momentum for the new platform. So we launched our pilot on Dynamic in July of this year, and our Blue Crew ambassadors received first and exclusive access to the platform. So we did 25 minute demos training sessions to give them a feel of the platform and start to gather some feedback from them to make sure that we’re building toward this great foundation for our all employee launch. By offering this exclusive access to the tool, it actually helped us triple enrollment in our ambassador program as we made it available to more employees. So we are now at 166 employees is really exciting. And actually in our first 30 days of our platform being live for our ambassadors, they actually outpaced all sharing activity from the previous quarter in just 30 days.

Speaker 2:
So really incredible. And of course I have to share a little bit of data with you as we launched this pilot. When we look at the impact of just the first 30 days alone, it just blew our expectations out of the water. So having access to this data and seeing what our ambassadors can do, I think makes us really excited for what our broader employee audience can do as they start to get access to this platform as well. So in 30 days, we had 113 active users. They shared over 2000 posts to various social platforms generating 18 million impressions and an earned media value of over $500,000. So again, this is all new, these are all new data points for us. We’re really excited about it and excited to see how we can grow this. Another thing I want to point out is that as part of this pilot launch, we also wanted to give more visibility to the authentic storytelling that our ambassadors are doing. So within the platform we have an ambassador content category where they’re encouraged to submit links to their social posts and we encourage other employees to go out and engage with them and share them. And again, just brings more visibility to those ambassadors who are creating great authentic stories on social.

Speaker 2:
So what’s next? I mentioned we launched our pilot in July of this year. So we are gearing up for our enterprise launch in October. So coming up really fast, and that’s where we open enrollment to all our employees to get involved in the Intel Share Hub and of course start sharing those metrics and progress toward our goals using the data that you saw in the previous slides. A few things that I just want to note in terms of the feedback and how we’re using that as we move forward into our all employee launch of dynamic, we’ve gotten some great feedback from our ambassador users. First is that they are hungry for content. So we have to think about as a team, how do we increase content volume while also maintaining the quality? We provide custom share text for them on the backend. So how do we think about balancing that workload so that we can ensure all the content coming in is of high quality, but that for those super users, we’re providing an ample amount of content as well?

Speaker 2:
And of course that with that comes the balancing the workload between the two of us, Terry and myself. How do we figure out how to approve content and make all of that manageable? And part of that is encouraging some more localization, looking at expanding categories to support our communicators in the regions as well as in various business units, training up new publishers who could help feed in more content into the platform, especially for those kind of local audiences. And we’re starting to implement some custom leaderboards for some of those audiences as well to really kind of build that momentum for our users. We have a new monthly report template that we’re starting to use to increase visibility of our performance and how we’re tracking toward goals. And then exciting today we actually just gave our ambassadors a way to start spreading the news first. So just as they receive first access to the platform, they got a little bit of a heads up that we’re going to be launching to all employees. And so we gave them kind of template copy so that they could spread the word with their network internally at Intel to start the engine a little bit early. So that’s what I have for you today. Thank you so much. We’ll have time for questions at the end, but I’d love for you to connect with me here at the conference or you can always email me or find me on LinkedIn.

Speaker 1:
Awesome. Big applause for Krista. So I’m going to embarrass Krista really quickly. This is her first time ever on stage, so you killed it. Well done Krista. Thank

Speaker 3:
You.

Speaker 1:
Massive applause. Good job. Alright, as mentioned, we are holding questions to the end, so please make sure you jot them down. I don’t want you forgetting any of the things that you want to ask her. There’s lots of things that we can go through. But I do want to hand over and introduce Talia, Tiara. Sorry, over to Tiara.

Speaker 3:
Hello, everyone. Got to love being the session right after lunch. I dunno about you, but I am going into rest and digest mode myself, so feel free to stand up with me, take a really brief stretch. I know I need it. Take a deep breath. We’re going to throw a lot of good stuff at you here. So you’re going to want to be ready to take notes. There’s tons of juicy stuff in here. We’re going to talk a little bit about shifting into high gear. I thought a little bit about what Poet Ali said this morning and finding the meaningful stuff for you and really making sure that you can bring a lot of value to any engagement that you might have. So that’s kind of the thought I put into this presentation when I thought about what you might want to see or hear, learn about when it comes to advocacy this year and building off of the wonderful presentation by Krista here at Intel.

Speaker 3:
So I’m Tiara Kesler, some of you may remember me briefly from Attune last year. So thanks Firstup for having me back. And funny enough, last year we were actually at this very moment launching our gamification program. So I was kind of frantically checking my phone, trying to see what was happening back home while we were at the conference. But today I’ll be making sure that I tell you a little bit about the results of what’s come from that. A little bit of background about me though, I lead our employee advocacy program at 3M. I have about 12 years or so of digital marketing and social media experience, and I’m from Minnesota, I love to travel. And back home I have my husband Justin, who I got married to last May in the south of France actually. And then our two fur babies, toothless and Oliver that you’ll see there. Any cat lovers here? Yes. Okay, everyone else can leave. No, I’m just kidding. Just kidding.

Speaker 3:
Alright, so just a quick look at our agenda here. Again, we’ve got a lot of value packed into a short amount of time, so I’m going to probably be whizzing through these different components, but I really wanted to share with you some of these engagement drivers of really how we took our program to the next level after the phases of global deployment and really laying that foundation and making sure that we set ourselves up for success. So a few of those are newsletters, our engagement campaigns, how we integrated global moments, a little bit of gamification and recognition, and then our ambassadors programs. So a little bit about 3M Amplify, which is our employee advocacy program at 3M. We started around four years ago or so, and we really had the intention of enabling and empowering employees to share company news and insights at scale while building and expanding the 3M brand and employee’s personal brands as well. And some of these goals might look similar to your company. Initiatives advance and protect the brand, attract and retain source talent, capture significant engagement and reach and generate influence.

Speaker 3:
So how we did that, we have a really great group of people leading this program. We have one global program lead, which is myself. We have six regional area leads who helped us stand up that global deployment and really make sure that the program was localized for success. We have over 400 content managers and now over 16,000 registered employees in our program. We’ve come a long way since last year. And then just a little bit of data to show you the impact of having a program that really pulls on the different levers throughout the organization. You’ll see we have a lot of posts coming into the platform. This is just a month of, I’m sorry, this is our all-time program. So over 21,000 posts into the program, over 446,000 shares, over 53 million in employee sharing value and now over 1.5 million clicks on shared content. And just knowing our presentations title last year was a journey to a million clicks. It’s just really impressive to see when you have engaged employees and engaged marketers, what you’re able to do in less than a year. And we’re still going, right? The year’s not over yet.

Speaker 3:
And then just to kind of take a step back and look at the overall maybe social approach and just the engagement that we’re able to drive through employee advocacy, you’ll see that our Amplify program has actually increased 3M’S reach by over 180%. And that’s on just LinkedIn alone. So I think it just goes to show that when you can partner employee advocacy in with a lot of your other channel marketing approaches, the value you’re able to bring back to your teams and content is Queen. We’re looking at a wide variety of content that our curators put into the platform every day. You’ll see that we’ve got science and innovation content. 3M is a big science hub, so it makes a ton of sense. People really want to see where is the company going, where is our industry going? So making sure that we have the right subject matter experts curating that content day in and day out has been really important.

Speaker 3:
And like Krista mentioned, heritage months, things like that are really important to employees as well. So our D N I team has been I think a very impactful group to engage and make sure that we have strong partnerships from communications within the D N I team as well. Awards we’ve seen time and time again, maybe marketing passes on them. They don’t go on the brand channel, but they do super well in employee advocacy. Employees love to know what is the employer excelling at and how do they share that in a meaningful way with their networks and really share their pride. 3M news and PR people want to stay connected to what’s happening at the organization, but everybody connects with that content differently. And it’s really amazing when you can see that authentic sharing approach when employees do share that out on social sustainability content.

Speaker 3:
The way the future, what’s next? What is 3M doing to improve the environment? Global social content. So kind of taking content that we’re already using on social media every day, great influencer content, the stuff that’s going to perform when employees do go ahead and share that out. We just reuse it and kind of can recycle that right into the employee advocacy platform. Lead gen and business content, the businesses sales folks, they’re able to actually show the impact to their bottom line when they’re sharing this content and helping to fill their funnel. And then people and culture, of course this makes sense, connecting employees with the things that they love, they care about what are their colleagues doing and how is that impacting and their networks.

Speaker 3:
So our five engagement drivers, here they are again. So we’re going to start off by talking about newsletters and just kind of how we brought that to life. And I know Krista talked a little bit about that as well, but we know employees are inundated with info as communicators, right? There’s so much to consume. So what we’ve found is consolidating and targeting newsletters to make sure that they’re really impacting employees where it matters most. And employees are 2.5 times more likely to view a post and two times as likely to share a post after receiving a newsletter or broadcast. So I think that debt data is fascinating and that was shared with us really early when we launched the program, but now we’re really seeing and reaping the benefits from deploying those newsletters on a consistent cadence.

Speaker 3:
So some of the pieces that put that puzzle together here right now at 3M, we share a weekly global newsletter that comes from the corporate communications team and we go out and we find what are the stories that are going to resonate most, what’s most timely from all across the organization? So a lot of cross-functional partnership and I think it really helps to break down those silos and bring the communications together in one centralized place. So really great content mix and we emphasize content that they might have missed even the previous week, right? So making sure that we resurface the things that we think they’re going to want to see and share, knowing that there’s just so much out there to consume. We do a member of the week shout out. So this is part of what heck actually fired up our gamification program.

Speaker 3:
We just wanted to start with some recognition, some soft touch initiatives, and make sure that people felt that they were valued for sharing content and sharing their pride. And we do promote our mobile app here as well. We know that the mobile app maybe doesn’t get as much touch, but by incorporating the steps to access the mobile app within the newsletter really helps to consolidate the things that they most need to know to be effective in this program. And to stay in touch, we’ve had a 48% average open rate, which I think is just incredible, 22% above industry average. And we send these out Thursdays, making sure that they’re during a time when people are going to be connected, especially knowing they’re global and not wanting to miss people at the end of their weeks broadcast we use as well. Sometimes we send these on special interest days or special announcements, maybe it’s a social post that needs to be more standalone so it gets special credit. But both of these paired together, we do make sure we empower the organization to tailor these to their audiences as well. So outside of the global newsletter, we do have areas that are empowered as well as business group leaders and we provide training and best practices to support that.

Speaker 3:
Next step is engagement campaigns. We talked a little bit about this one last year as well, but really making sure that we’re leveraging the great features that are already available in the platform and that are going to help drive people into the tool and make sure that they are supported along the way, along the journey of onboarding, of sharing, of learning how to use social media. And so one thing that we did was an educational drip campaign and we wanted to make sure that people who are maybe finding out about the program had just started registering, didn’t drop out. As we scaled our program, we stopped doing as many handholding live trainings and instead we shifted a little bit more to on demand training. So we wanted to make sure that people didn’t miss out on those training materials and forget about the program altogether.

Speaker 3:
So we launched this campaign, it was a five-part drip campaign sent over the course of two weeks as we speak now we are bringing that down to a four-part campaign and instead adjusting the welcome email to make sure that something that they’re already getting is tailored to them and is making the biggest impact right out of the gate. These cover a variety of topics from registration steps, connecting your social accounts best practices, making sure that they really know why, what’s in it for them. And what’s awesome is it drove 98.5% of recipients to complete registration last year.

Speaker 3:
We’ve also done a really great job of integrating global moments, and this is something that we’ve been working on more recently. It’s something that I’m really passionate about. So finding the opportunities across the organization where you can break down those silos and make sure that you’re able to share employee stories, right? If you share employee stories, they’re likely to want to be inspired to share the company’s story as well, right? So making sure that we have alignment across the company to activate on global moments like International Women’s Day for example. This really created a cohesive and aligned message from leadership all the way down to each individual employee and it was really cross-functional collaboration and it’s fun to see an employee advocacy first strategy that can come through, cut through that noise and provide visibility all in a centralized newsletter. So that’s kind of what we would use to bring forward all the great content, whether it was from a social media team, the D N I team, maybe third party content around that moment, maybe it was a leader seminar or speaker, making sure that they had everything in one central place. How we brought that to life was with a temporary category and then we targeted that through a newsletter to folks who subscribed to our employee resource network categories as well as our global comms.

Speaker 3:
So I’ll talk a little bit about gamification and recognition. As I mentioned, we started with our member of the week just soft touch way to keep morale high. And I really wanted to make sure we were recognizing people who were doing really great work in the program were in there every day just because they wanted to share their pride with their networks and demonstrate their subject matter expertise. So this was really the launching ground along with seeing some gamification from our area partners Canada for example, launched some gamification along with some of our business groups, which really helped us build the case for a global gamification program.

Speaker 3:
I think what’s important to call out is that we wanted to put our money where our mouth was. We wanted to be able to back it up with something, not just give ’em a pat on the back and say, really well done, thank you very much, but to give them something tangible that they could take home some cool prizes. So we were able to get budget through those case studies and apply it towards our internal employee recognition software, which I think was a game changer. We don’t have to worry about shipping stuff out or local regulations in different countries. So this helped us cut through that noise and make it a really easy and clear case to move forward with. And you can see from this time last year, we have increased our membership by almost 6,000 employees. We have bumped up in our internal engagement just through communications around the gamification.

Speaker 3:
I think it’s great to see the views and the engagements on Yammer. So really helping to work with our internal comms folks as well and bring this full circle. And then external engagement, where I tend to look is how are we growing in our sharing across employees, really keeping them engaged and then how is that transferring to external engagements and making sure that we’re driving impact on social as well. So an increase of 80% in shares and almost 40% in engagements. And we’re layering on this every single day through more word of mouth and people finding out the great stuff that we’re doing through this program, the awesome prizes people are taking home. So it’s really fun stuff to see and to be able to promote.

Speaker 3:
And I know Krista talked a little bit about ambassadors programs we’re kind of coming back around to that. So we started out with maybe a smaller group of early adopters when we launched our program, but now we’re coming back around to how do we take the folks that are maybe most engaged or maybe take a group of people who raise their hand and say, I want to be more engaged and I want to learn more about how to use social media. So awesome to see that. One of our area leads in Latin America actually took and localized a program that taps onto our Amplify program and they kicked off with 180 active members last year and they integrated social media training, personal branding, some corporate training and access to special events and really put an emphasis on 3M amplify the platform that kind of fuels it all.

Speaker 3:
So great to see that now in 2023, they’re bringing in 318 members that joined the program. So as they get more word of mouth, they get more activity and people learn about the really great resources that are coming through this program. They’re actually bringing in more folks year over year. And what I heard when I talked to the woman who runs this program, she mentioned that when budgets are tight, it’s really important that marketers and communicators know that they can rely on a platform like this to generate those organic results. And with the right training and resources, they can really make sure that employees are equipped and set up for success.

Speaker 3:
And then this one’s sort of my most recent baby, you can say the super users pilot program. We’ve been working really hard to find people who are most engaged in the program and now come back around, not just survey them and see what those survey results say, but find new ways to engage them and make sure that they’re having a meaningful experience and they can help drive what’s next for the program as well. So we launched this in the summer in June, and this is about the top 20 people in the program, whether they’re driving the most reach, most engagement, what we generally look at is highest engagements per share from a data standpoint and making sure that they have training that equips them with the best practices in the platform. How do they use it to the best of their abilities? We may know it being admins in the platform, but they might have overlooked those early on.

Speaker 3:
We have them participate in tests each quarter, so as they participate in tests, they actually get a chance to win points, which they can bring home awesome prizes for. And then we also want to make sure that we provide them with social media training and how to create content and share their own personal voice, help them build their thought leadership. I think that’s been a critical piece of feedback, especially for those people who are maybe in a more elevated place and make sure that they are equipped with maybe more curated and tailored content as well. So working with our communications team, our social team, some of our global colleagues, and finding those meaningful moments and creating content that they’re getting exclusively in the platform. So you’ll see one of our more recent campaigns, the 3M forward campaign there, and that category was just targeted to them to be able to share with their networks. And you’ll see some of the data points there just showing how much more engagement they drive on average than a general employee in the program. So we know that tapping into them and making sure that they’re equipped, they can help us take that program to the next level.

Speaker 3:
So what’s to come here? We’re generating more trainings and making sure that we are equipping them to be thought leaders. Some of them might already be, but how can we upskill? How can we make sure that they are the most impactful within their digital communities? How can we help them demonstrate their personal brands and share 3M brand content and how do we help them max out the potential of the Amplify platform or even help us find those hidden opportunities that as admins we don’t know are going to be so successful for the rest of the community and make sure that we have sort of a pilot or test environment to do that. We make sure that they have tracking and reporting so they really know how to lean in and maybe where to pull back, where to spend most of their energy when it comes to social posts.

Speaker 3:
Creating great content and making sure they know what drives impact. And then continuous improvement, making sure that they have those best practices, bringing in a LinkedIn expert and making sure they have training that’s around these social platforms that matter to them and that they know how to use them to the best of their abilities. We also talked a little bit about the social media policy, making sure that they are following 3M policy and guidelines. Fun stuff I know, but very important and we want to make sure they feel confident in that when they’re sharing. And then last but not least, case studies, learning from other vendors and learning from each other. So really bringing that together in a community where they feel like they can be heard and they can bounce ideas around outside of what we might provide on a day-to-day. Alright, we’ve reached our destination, thank you so much. And feel free to connect with me after the session on LinkedIn. Happy to answer any other questions.

Speaker 1:
Awesome, thank you Tara. Alright, so I’m going to start off with a couple of questions before we open up to the group. I’m actually going to stand over here so you’re not looking or could lead to the side. So I do want to start, first of all actually for a question for the room. Who in here already has an advocacy program? Please raise your hand. Who is thinking about getting an advocacy program? Who is unsure? Alright, so we know who we’re speaking to, so that is helpful. So I do want to start first off with the people who are thinking or not Sure question to both of you. Intel and 3M are huge brands, right? Everybody knows the name, they’re household brands. Why is advocacy important? Why have we invested in this? Do you want to start, Krista?

Speaker 2:
Yeah, I think for our employees it gives them an opportunity to more deeply connect with the brand to be those thought leaders spreading the greatness of Intel. Externally, I think we have, this is an opportunity for employees to share that pride in where they work and what they do. But certainly for us it’s about building our brand. It’s about getting the word out about the great things that Intel is doing to create world changing technology that impacts the lives of everyone on the planet. And now we have this opportunity with this platform to now start to measure the brand impact of advocacy. And I think that’s just such an incredible way for us to now add value to the program to show what’s actually happening with this advocacy that hopefully we’re, so it’s twofold, we’re engaging our employees, but it drives brand impact as well.

Speaker 1:
Tiara, same question.

Speaker 3:
I mean she summed it up pretty well. I’ll add on just the testimonials that I hear back, especially from our folks in maybe sales roles where they’re trying to reach customers and prospects, they’re on the ground trying to get their foot in the door, they’re really equipped with a content hub of approved content, things that they feel safe and confident in sharing with their networks. And I think that’s fundamental to make sure that they are able to be part of that social selling wave, make sure that they’re able to represent themselves in the brand in the best possible light and that the end of the day they’re able to be advocates for the brand and share their pride.

Speaker 1:
And then another question in your businesses, was the need for advocacy driven by leadership or was it driven by other teams lower down and we had to convince leaders that advocacy was important.

Speaker 2:
I can go first. So I think for us leadership knew that it was important. We were fortunate in that, that we knew that we needed advocacy. I think where we needed to get more buy-in was how advocacy actually works. So it’s not about like, oh, we’ll just post this and then everybody’s going to want to share it. We have to be able to create opportunities to engage employees at those moments that matter to them. And so it was wonderful to start off with that immediate buy-in that we knew there was value in advocacy across both marketing communications and hr, but really being able to prove the value of what we can do with advocacy and how we need to do it,

Speaker 3:
I

Speaker 2:
Think was where we had more work ahead of us.

Speaker 1:
I’m going to ask you as well, Tiara.

Speaker 3:
Yeah, I mean I think at 3M, it predates me a little bit for how we deployed, but I think it started off with our team in communications, seeing the value, maybe hearing inputs from marketers across the organization, more in the middle management tier. We definitely did have to sort of sell it internally, get our leaders across the organization to understand it and to get behind it. And that was one of our initiatives last year as well actually was an executive engagement initiative and making sure that they felt pulled into the program as well, that they could share their pride in the company, that they could share their thought leadership, they could build up their LinkedIn presence. So kind of bringing that full circle for them to say, Hey, this is what we need and why we need it, but then here’s how it also can benefit you in the long run.

Speaker 1:
Incredible. And both of you are at very different stages in terms of your platform’s, maturity and health. So I want to guess understand from both of you, what are the learnings that you have? One being a very mature program and one being very new and much smaller scale. Is there anything that if you could go back and say, Hey, I would do this differently, what would those things be?

Speaker 3:
That’s a good question. I know different teams definitely own different things throughout a large organization. So definitely getting buy-in from folks that you’re going to be partnering with in the long run early. So hr, your talent acquisition team, it’s great to bring them along legal, they’re your partners in it too, making sure that it’s a safe place for employees to go for content that they might share externally as well as view internally, bringing those leaders in, making sure that they understand the why and that they can help pass on the how to their team so that they can continue to engage. Because if they’re not engaged, it’s really an uphill battle for you to go and to bring people into the platform. If you can have some of that top down where leaders are showing the value and they’re bringing it up in their team meetings and they’re participating in the gamification and recognition that really does a lot of the work for you. So I would say those are a few of the places I would start.

Speaker 2:
Yeah, I am not going to totally copy your answer, but really the partnerships are so core to growing our program and I think what I’ve learned is that we have some incredible partners in some regions who are building advocacy into their broader strategic communications plans. And those partnerships are already starting to create such value. And we’re seeing that as we build out, as we grow our ambassador community, as we start to launch this new platform, those partners are so essential in spreading that message and getting employees on board. They’re helping us with that content volume issue. How do we create a lot of great content in the platform that meets our employees needs but without overloading one person? So if I could go back in time, I would start earlier building those relationships so that we could have more partners in all of the regions who are doing some of what we have in pockets today.

Speaker 1:
So really those internal relationships is the key to success. Yeah. Alright. I’m going to ask you each one question before we open up to the room. So I want to ask you, first of all, Krista, you have authentic advocacy is a really key strategic initiative as part of this platform. Why authentic advocacy? What is the reasoning behind that and what are you seeing as a value coming out of driving that type of approach?

Speaker 2:
Yeah, I think at Intel we have this kind of legacy of being really risk averse when it comes to sharing. And so a lot of our employees are just like, it’s best if I just don’t, right? Because if I’m not feeling a hundred percent confident that I’m saying the right thing, just not going to. And so we were seeing people sharing content, but usually they were only including the required hashtag Im Intel or maybe a copy and paste sentence. And so especially as we launch this platform, we don’t want it to be this vacuum of the same message being shared by employees. We look at that share text that’s provided within the tool as a starting point. And that’s really what we train employees on. I think the other point that’s super relevant to me sitting within employer brand is that we want employees to be sharing their own experiences and being able to create these social media posts that actually means something and will resonate with their networks. So we talk about what’s the makeup of your network and what do they care about and what do you want to be known for? What is your personal brand? And let’s think about that as we’re writing content. So not everybody feels like the best copywriter in the,

Speaker 1:
And that’s okay, but if you can start to think about the connection for your network rather than just clicking share on every post, we don’t want that. We want quality. So I think it’s a number of things, but

Speaker 3:
Really just

Speaker 1:
Getting at quality content coming from our employees. Amazing. And I mean the flip side, so you have over 16,000 registered users, Tiara on the 3M program. How do you ensure authenticity? How do you ensure that there’s not a sort of spamming of the same content, the same message because you have such a huge volume of people that are on there and that are sharing actively.

Speaker 3:
I don’t know if there is any insuring without removing the element of having folks sharing from an empowered place. So there’s governance and we make sure we have all of those governance pieces, the social media policy or rebuilding our social media policy course right now, working on getting that required for all employees knowing that everybody has access to this program. But then it comes down to training and making sure that they feel they have access to all the training pieces that they might need to be effective. And we talked about employees being inundated with information. It can be really hard to reach them with this training, especially when you’re coming at it from sort of people are volunteering to join, we want to make sure that they participate. So we attack that from a variety of ways. We have a global manager training sessions and we do those quarterly.

Speaker 3:
And I think that really helps take all the burden off of me and make sure that we have people in every business, in every part of the organization globally who can help drive those best practices, those trainings, those governance pieces, making sure that everyone’s equipped and that they can localize that too. So it doesn’t always feel like someone’s just talking at you from corporate, but how do you really make that tangible for someone in a business and make it make sense for the work that they’re doing? If they are trying to drive a sale, if they are trying to recruit new talent, if they are trying to demonstrate their thought leadership, maybe they want to share third party content, how do you do that in the best way? So we definitely rely on a lot of folks to help pass along those essential training pieces.

Speaker 1:
Fantastic. Alright, so we are going to open up to questions in the room. We have a running mic, so anybody want to put their hand up and go first? Be the brave first salt we got. All right, byebye. Okay. But you do have to stand up and you do have to tell us your name and your organization. Thank you.

Speaker 4:
I’m Mike Lechler with McKee Foods. I imagine that both your organizations are a lot like ours, probably about a 5.5 to one manufacturing hourly to salaried people. How are you working to get those hourly folks, people on the shop floor and the production floor involved in your

Speaker 5:
Program? Or is it largely salaried?

Speaker 3:
I can start, mine’s a little bit maybe short. We are mainly focused, our deployment has been focused around our desk workers. You could say. Just making sure that we first have that solid foundation of content flow. We’ve got our trainings in place, we have employees who’ve raised their hand volunteering, wanting to participate and to build out all the best practices and processes that go with that. We want to bring in our hourly workers, our plant manufacturing workers. But I think that comes next. There’s a whole nother piece on how you would deploy that and make sure that you’re reaching them through the channels that they communicate. So for us, that’s still to come. I dunno, Krista, if you have more that you can add on.

Speaker 2:
Yeah, I mean we’re similar. We use the Firstup platform for our internal communication. So we’re fortunate that we have a solid foundation with that and a lot of learnings that we will infuse into dynamic as we launch it to more employees. I think part of it is making sure that it’s accessible to them. So for folks who don’t have a computer that they’re at all day, we’re working to get greater access to the mobile app so that employees can have it on unmanaged devices and have access to that shareable content to easily share at a time and a place that works for them. And also I think going back to my point about building those relationships, I think we’re kind of in the stage right now as an employer brand team of really partnering with that organization to understand what their employee’s needs are, how can we build this out in a way that’s going to work for them, be accessible for them.

Speaker 2:
I think the final component of it is within the platform we try to organize content so that any employee can come in and easily find something that resonates with them. So looking at right now we have a small amount of categories that we assign content to, but what’s going to resonate with an employee in manufacturing? We’ve got a lot of great news coming out of that organization. Can we make it really easy for them to come in and find a manufacturing category so that content is ultra relevant for them? I think that’s something we would consider as well. So still very early on, but something that we know is really important and we want to be able to solve for.

Speaker 5:
Fantastic. I think we had a question down the front. Kyla?

Speaker 2:
Yes.

Speaker 5:
Hello, my name is Amanda, I’m with Odie. We’re a plumbing manufacturer. I saw on both your slides you had the earned media value mentioned. Is that something that you’re getting from dynamic? It

Speaker 3:
Gets it to you? Yeah. Okay.

Speaker 2:
It is pretty cool. Yeah.

Speaker 5:
Okay, great. And then are you mainly targeting LinkedIn as the social media platform? Does it even work with others?

Speaker 1:
Do people use other platforms?

Speaker 3:
So we mainly focus our efforts and our energy around LinkedIn. That’s just generally where professionals are going to be making sure that they tap into that network. And we get the data back from LinkedIn, right? The a p I integrations there. Twitter, we also have, or X, whatever you’re calling it right now, the data connection is there as well. So we definitely have both integrated in our program. They can share to Facebook. They also share to, I think we’ve got zinging set up. So depending on their needs, they can share to a variety of different platforms. But really where we’re measuring and seeing the biggest value is LinkedIn and then kind of an offshoot of that. We have Twitter in there as well.

Speaker 2:
Yeah, we in our pilot phase so far we’ve seen a larger share of X sharing Twitter than I think we expected. We have about 60% going to LinkedIn and about 40% going to X. But one of the great things about the mobile app and making that more accessible is that folks can also share directly to Instagram. So we’re really excited about that also. But right now, yeah, it’s mostly LinkedIn and then also X.

Speaker 1:
Alright. We’ve got some questions down the front while we’re mic running. Just really quickly, can you tell us what the response is? We sort of mentioned E M V. What’s the response when you show leaders that E M V value?

Speaker 2:
I mean, for us it’s new and so their response is positive. I

Speaker 3:
Mean,

Speaker 2:
I think we didn’t really know what to expect in terms of what is that calculation going to be. We worked with our paid media team to actually input values that our reflective of what Intel would truly pay for paid media. So I think especially as we explain that people are really impressed that we now have that data. I think also it helps us forge greater partnerships across our organizations by being able to put that number in front of them and say, this is what you would’ve paid if we had done a paid media campaign instead of leveraging employee advocacy for this. So again, early stages, but the response so far has been really positive and I think we can already see it kind of helping us push forward.

Speaker 3:
Yeah, I would agree. I think it’s definitely helped us make more partnerships and from this businesses for those folks in sales marketing, helping get their leadership engaged and helping them see where that impacts their bottom line money that they maybe don’t have in their budgets right now to spend on social paid ad campaigns, things like that. They’re able to actually drive and see results through employee advocacy. So I think that’s really helped them see this as a new channel to integrate into their broader marketing plans and that it’s just as valuable if not more valuable at times to leverage.

Speaker 5:
Hi, Sammy Roberts from Kohler Company. You guys have so much excitement around your advocacy program, so that’s great to hear. But I’d love to know any tips and tricks for folks who may launched a plan and they’re not getting the excitement they would see or how are you marketing it to your associates or employees? That’d be great.

Speaker 2:
I think for us, that’s kind of been why we’ve started with that ambassador audience of who is already showing some interest and maybe even some skill around advocacy and how can we help empower them to lead the way across our organization. So our goal, I mentioned that our problem statement as we started this kind of advocacy journey was that we had less than 1% of employee sharing. Our goal right now is 5%, which for us is just around 6,000 employees, which is huge. But we’re starting there. We’re starting with folks who are showing some of that interest so that we can help. They can be a part of really building this and helping us pave the way. So there’s certainly a bridge to cross where we look to engage some of those people who aren’t yet sharing, but we’re starting small.

Speaker 3:
Yeah, find those champions, find the champions, and they will help infuse it into their organization or team structure that might take some of the work off of the team that’s running the show day to day.

Speaker 5:
Awesome. I’m going to break the rules. We have time for one more question. Okay. Down here. Hi, I am Allie and I’m with Providence, and I won’t lie. It makes me a little bit nervous when you’re saying that you’re going to have employees make content and put it on their social media because coming from healthcare, I don’t really want my employees doing that due to hipaa, patient privacy, those little things. So I’m interested to learn about how you’re tweaking your social media policy to make sure that information that you don’t want getting out there in the public isn’t getting out there.

Speaker 3:
I can start. I think first and foremost, the great thing about the employee advocacy program is that it is sort of a governed body of content. So anybody can create content and post it on social media. That’s sort of a given, but this really helps people find the content that we want them to share and it’s already framed up for them in a positive way. While we recommend through training that they tailor that content with personalized share texts, make sure that it will resonate with their networks, it’s already sort of written out for them exactly as we’d like for them to amplify that on social. So I think that takes out some of the risk in itself. And then in the social media policy, we just try to make it really clear the different pieces. Of course, there’s some gray area. We don’t want to tell them exactly what they can and can’t do with their personal social networks, but making sure that it’s clear that they’re being respectful, that they are representing the brand at all times, and to look at things through a global lens and make sure that they do bring things back to the team or legal, their supervisor if they’re ever unsure.

Speaker 3:
So making sure that that’s all really clear for them. And through kind of building out our new course, we’ve been looking at it through all those lens and getting legal involved, all of the right stakeholders to make sure that that course is setting them up for success.

Speaker 2:
Yeah, I mean much of the same. I think we also encourage through our advocacy program office that people come to us if they’re unsure about how does this post look? Is this okay to say? We’ve also made our social media guidelines visible within the platform, so not only are we providing pre-approved texts for them to leverage, that includes our required hashtag, but we’ve also got those social media guidelines right at the top, so if they are questioning anything, they can easily pop over to that. We’ve done some kind of bite size integration of the social media guidelines into the training, so things like don’t use product code names, making all of that. Again, just integrating it throughout our training that we make available and then making it visible within the platform as well.

Speaker 1:
Amazing. All right, so I want to give two takeaways for everyone. One is build up your network internally and build your partnerships. It sounds like that’s really key to unlocking advocacy. And the second is give numbers, hard numbers. It sounds like EMV has been hugely available. So applause everyone, please. Thank you so much, Tiara and Krista, it’s been amazing. They’ll be around for anybody who wants to ask questions, but stick around if you want to stay in this breakout room. We will be talking about empowering engagement. Thank you ladies.