Social media has changed the way we communicate, not only with friends and family, but in our business relationships as well. With our hectic day-to-day, we can now perform a quick scroll and catch up on the lives of those around us, all before crawling out of bed or uttering a word. And of course, this has its own positives and negatives – it alters the way people interact with others, with media, and with brands.

The days of billboard advertising being the go-to medium are long gone. Given how we interact with media has changed so drastically, it’s only natural the media around us changes, too. Enter the concept of employee advocacy. Much like influencer marketing, employee advocacy enables businesses to use the power of people, and their influential capacity, to expose others to news, information, and brand messaging as it relates to their company or purpose. And, it’s taking businesses by storm and delivering fascinating results.

In this episode of AMP UP Your Digital Marketing we meet Andrew Hutchinson, Content and Social Media Manager at Social Media Today, to discuss the findings on a GaggleAMP commissioned employee advocacy report. In this discussion, we’ll cover why there has been such a rising interest in employee advocacy and what the data in the report told us about marketers perceptions.

You can download Building the Case for an Employee Advocacy Program discussed on this episode at any time.

Transcript:

Glenn: Welcome back to the show. Today we’re speaking with Andrew Hutchinson. Andrew, welcome to the show.

Andrew:  Thank you very much for having me, Glenn.

Glenn: Andrew, can you tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do?

Andrew: I am the Head of Content and Social Media at Social Media Today. So, basically all the content that goes through Social Media Today comes through me. The majority of them are written by me. The majority of posts that are written by us each day. And yeah, I manage all that content and keep us going.

Glenn: And so, I’m really excited to have you on the show today because we’re going to drill into some research that you all did, it was sponsored by GaggleAMP but it was 100% done by Social Media Today. And I thought you really tapped into some really interesting findings which I hope we can go into. But can you kind of tee it up for us and tell us a little bit about the survey, how it was done and, you know, why we think it might have the validity that it has?

Andrew: Yeah. So, we conducted a survey on employee advocacy or the state of employee advocacy. We run regular surveys throughout the year on different aspects of social media and digital marketing. And what we do is, we basically send it out to our community and we try to get as many people as possible to respond. We send it out via email and via social networks. And, yes, see what people are actually experiencing.

So, it’s one thing to theoretically write about what’s happening in the industry and what’s happening with the latest advertising trends or whatever, but it’s another thing to get the actual feedback from the people who are on the frontline and they’re actually doing it. So, we find that really valuable to actually get real world experience. And it’s really valuable for our readers in particular, because it’s not theoretical, it’s not just us saying, hey, this is a new ad thing from Facebook, this is actually what people are experiencing.

So, for this survey we had over 400 respondents which gave us a reasonable field of response. I think half of them were B2B, around half B2B, half B2C, 54% were B2B and 29%, sorry, were B2C. So, yeah,