Matt Mullan00:02 — All right, so you've got two things that happen. One, like you said, people are just like, I don't really care to share what my company's talking about. That's one thing. The second thing that may not work is that you're developing parrots. You're literally just developing your employees to just repeat the same message over and over again. And that's a serious struggle, and it's one to challenge your own social media team and employees with.
Ben Ard00:50 — Welcome back to another episode of Content Amplified. Today I'm joined by Matt. Matt, welcome to the show.
Matt Mullan00:55 — Ben, thank you for having me. I'm looking forward to this conversation.
Ben Ard00:58 — Yeah, Matt, I'm excited to dive in. This is going to be fun. We're going to talk a lot about how to get employees involved in social media and what that looks like. But before we dive in, Matt, let's get to know you, your background, work history, all that kind of fun stuff so the audience knows who you are.
Matt Mullan01:12 — Absolutely. So I'm Matt Mullan. I'm a director of social media at NinjaOne, where an IT operations platform. And I've been in social media way too long. I mean, Google Plus and MySpace were things that I used to be playing around with. So I've been in social media for going on 13 years now. I've worked at international toy manufacturers to HR and payroll software companies, cybersecurity, IT management companies. I'm really focused on B2B social media, and that's my day in and day out, something I'm actually passionate about, which sounds weird to say that I'm passionate about B2B social media, but it is what it is.
Ben Ard01:49 — I love that. That's amazing. I love that you said Google Plus back in the day. In a former life I used to do landscape photography. And I had like millions of views on Google Plus and it was so devastating when that platform went away. So I know. It was good times, all the circles and all that fun stuff. No, you see platforms come and go. I love that. That's fun.
Matt Mullan02:01 — Yeah, the platform journeys, the life cycles of them, is pretty interesting. And along the way you get to test them all out. I mean, I remember testing out Snapchat for an HR and payroll software company. So imagine advertising on there and seeing if we needed to do that. And this is only when Snapchat was like two years old. So it's just interesting to be a part of all these social platform life cycles.
Ben Ard02:20 — I love that. That's awesome. Well, Matt, we're going to talk about a fun subject today. What we agreed to talk on before we started this episode is employees are your best content amplifiers in social media. So we're talking about this employee advocacy area. And honestly, it feels like most efforts don't work when it comes to employee advocacy. People don't actually want to post on social media about their company or any of that kind of stuff. Why doesn't the system work really well nowadays when it comes to that?
Matt Mullan03:01 — All right, so you've got two things that happen. One, like you said, people are just like, I don't really care to share what my company's talking about. That's one thing. The second thing that may not work is that you're developing parrots. You're literally just developing your employees to just repeat the same message over and over again. And that's a serious struggle, and it's one to challenge your own social media team and employees with.
So to tackle both of those things, there's a lot that you can do. You can, one, make it interesting. That way you're giving them something to talk about that's like, maybe I would like to post this. And my thought behind it is you're not trying to amplify what you're posting. You want to position your employees as thought leaders. So I worked with LinkedIn a lot at one of my previous roles in developing a social selling program. And one of the major things that we worked on was that your sales team, your social selling team that you're trying to develop, and your employees as a result, are supposed to be positioned as thought leaders, because that's how you develop trust. Well, what are you going to be doing if all you're giving your employees to share is content about your product that is not positioning them as thought leaders? And so the challenge there becomes, okay, so then what content do you provide to them? And what you really need to find is interesting pieces of content, assets, articles that are about the industry that position your company and your employees as thought leaders, as experts in the space. Your employees should want to be excited to share something that positions them as thoughtful and as an expert.
So I think that solves both of those issues at once. Now the parrot part of it is that you're struggling to enable them, right? You're like, okay, here's the article that I want you to share. Here's some suggested copy. But you really want them to start taking it on their own to put their own thought and voice behind it. That's a real struggle, and you need to enable them by supporting them. You need to give tutorials, trainings, advice on how to craft that so that they're comfortable with it. Because let's face it, if you're not on social media, if you're not in marketing, it can be daunting and scary to create your own LinkedIn post that you know is going out into the world. And so I think that you need to support them in a variety of ways. Support your employees with the trainings that are necessary so that they feel comfortable, and then give them the resources, give them options, make more than one suggested copy, give them guardrails, but say, hey, you're going to have to change this. So put the bumpers on like you're bowling, say, here's a sentence you can use, but you need to fill in the gaps. It's like playing Mad Libs, but in a better, more controlled way. So that's some of the struggles that I think exist as far as just getting employees to use employee advocacy.
Ben Ard05:59 — I love that. So not creating parrots. You want people to have original thought, things of that nature, and not just spew out, our product is so awesome, look at us, kind of an idea. You want to show them, I know what's going on in the industry, I care about what's going on, I'm passionate about it, here's my perspective, things of that nature. How do you motivate people? I feel like this is something that people struggle with, where people say, my job is to build things or to talk to customers, and my job is not to post on social media. How do you motivate and teach how important this motion really is and get people excited about it?
Matt Mullan06:34 — So the easy answer, money. No, just seriously, like gifts, things like that. That's the easy answer. But not every social media department, not every marketing department, is going to have budget to just throw people a prize or whatever for doing that. But gamification does work, making people aware that they can win prizes for sharing. Is that the best holistic approach? No. So to really get to the root of it and to drive that adoption is to show them the true value and really make sure that they feel supported. So I'll give some examples. Recently, we've noticed that a couple of our employees have started to just create their own posts. So not through their employee advocacy program or anything. And we took that and we just shouted it from the rooftops. We're talking like any Slack channel we could find. We were sharing that post, talking about how awesome it was, because we want them to feel like, that's what we want. We don't want to have to rely on just an employee advocacy tool, because that's just the start. You want to get that ball rolling, get them feeling comfortable that they can say, I had this awesome experience, I'm just going to talk about it myself. That is when you finally got the momentum going. So whenever you see any little win, shout it, make everyone in the company aware, and just show that support.
The other thing is really just trainings. You need to get all of your new hires on board them appropriately, so where they have the training and the information. So not only do we do a training saying, hey, look, this is our employee advocacy tool, this is how it works, this is what we're going to provide you, feel free to do X, Y, and Z. We also start to add in ongoing training materials in the employee advocacy training section. So when they go back to it outside of that training, there's other tips and tricks, best practices, things like that, and guides that'll show them how to use it and feel more comfortable. The other thing is, again, going back to the content that you're giving to them. Try and get external content that is not about your product, but is about the industry, thought leadership assets, and they'll want to engage with those. Whether it's a popular news article, something that happened in the news that they're excited about, they're going to want to do that just by their nature. Like, this is really cool, I want to share that. So hopefully that answers your question a little bit.
Ben Ard09:00 — Yeah, I love that. That's perfect. So when you're doing the research to find the thought leadership and to find things that are relevant and interesting that aren't just, again, product updates, do you have any go-to tips or ideas? I'm throwing you a curve ball here, but are you just staying on top of industry news? Do you have updates from like Google mentions or things like that? How do you find what you consider to be really good content that you want to push out there through your employees?
Matt Mullan09:29 — So I think that there's a variety of tools out there. Any tools that you can get at your disposal, whether they're free or whether it's part of a listening package that maybe your PR team has, you know, not everyone has access to those, but there are a variety of tools, right? So try and find as many tools as you can. And that way you can sort through them as they come in. I think that's the easiest way. Now, I'll be honest with you, for me, over the years, the best one that I've seen is finding the partnerships within your organization, to where the PR team and the other people who are staying on top of those can help find and source relevant news articles that are about the industry. That's going to allow you to say, all right, this one's a really good one. And the reason why I say that they are a great partnership is because they know, your PR team especially is going to know the core messaging that your company wants to align with. So if they've already found it as an alignment in their messaging to fit with the article, then you know it's like an easy fit for your employees to go ahead and just engage with it and share from there. So I wish I had like a, use this tool to get X, Y, and Z. But unfortunately, that's tough, you know, especially because we, in our individualized roles in marketing, may not truly know the most accurate alignment to our messaging. So you just got to collaborate with as many people as you can.
Ben Ard10:49 — I love that. Yeah, that makes perfect sense. So you talked about it before we clicked the record button, we were talking and you talked about how you love everything about what you do, how you're passionate about it. Even in your intro, you love everything you're doing. And a part of that was because you get the creative side and the analytical side. Now, nowadays, it feels like businesses more than ever have to really justify all of their actions, everything they're doing. When it comes to employee advocacy, getting people to be content amplifiers in social media, what metrics do you care about? What are you looking at to prove the value to the business, to yourself, to know that something is working, to know when you should pivot? What are some of those things that you care about so that you can kind of inform, improve, and progress over time?
Matt Mullan11:34 — So in most employee advocacy tools, they should be giving you potential impressions, an earned media value, right? Now, we all know, let's be real, earned media value is just kind of like a made up number, let's just say, and it's always gonna fluctuate. Same thing with potential impressions. We all know that they're not getting those potential impressions, because they're just taking off of what their networks are and figuring this is what they could potentially get. Is that really getting to the accurate data for employee advocacy? No. However, if you're using proper link tracking, UTMs built in, so that way the content that you are sharing, you can visibly see the traffic that comes from just those links, that's going to give you the most accurate measurement of success. I think that with the tools, you're going to get a variety of metrics, like just seeing if your program's working overall, rough estimates are like, okay, is my usage percentage at a high enough level. If I'm at 50% of usage for the tool, I'm pretty happy, because that means that half of my company, or half of the people, are in there monthly using the tool and sharing the content that we're putting in there for them. Now, that gives you insights into, is the content that we're adding in there good enough to get people excited to want to share and engage with it? So if you ever see it drop below that 50%, that's just me personally using it, and I've used a 50% metric for the past two or three years. And if I have that as my bar and it dips below, it's usually because the content's not there. And if I can get it above, you usually look at the content being above average. So that's a good indicator on if it's working.
Now, there's another aspect of employee advocacy and success that I think should get more highlights and attention, and I kind of want to segue into that as far as if we're really getting the most out of our employee advocacy and content amplification, and that is commenting. Commenting is taking off right now, especially on LinkedIn, as this great indicator of what a good post is, what makes a good post. So not only can you get your employees to just share content or just reshare your own content, we're finding that the comments are getting more impressions than a reshare. And it's because they're adding value to the conversation. We're not talking hand clap emojis. We're not talking, let's go team. We're talking actual insights, things that add value to the conversation and get that post even more exposure, keep the conversation going. So we're trying to enable some of our closest social media advocates on our team to jump into the comment section on LinkedIn, on Instagram, et cetera. So that way they're continuing the conversation and adding value to it. That has been like the next lever that we're pulling. And that's a really easy one to increase performance on as far as the data is concerned. You get to see an increased reach and engagement numbers, engagement rate, and just overall impressions. So that's kind of like what I would suggest as far as making sure that what you're doing in your efforts are successful and seeing what's working and what's not.
Ben Ard14:47 — I love that advice. And it is so fascinating because as a business, if you're posting from a business account, things of that nature, every platform just demolishes your impressions. There's like none. You'll get like five impressions, depending, you know, regardless of how big your audience is. But if you can actually get individuals interacting with that content, then all of a sudden it shows up in the feed. It gets people excited because the humans are there and the people are talking about it. I think that's such good advice, getting your employees to have a conversation, have it online, have a lot of fun with it. I think that's a ton of fun. I think that's so cool.
Matt Mullan15:22 — What we've done is we've developed a social ambassador program, and it's a tiger team of individuals who are highly active on social media. And it's a Slack group that we can say, hey, look, we've got this coming up, because employee advocacy tools don't offer this. So we kind of created this in-house, and my social media manager, she runs that tiger team. And so when we need amplification, when we need people to jump in to conversations and support, that's who we go to. The social ambassadors are just this like extra strong muscle when it comes to employee advocacy that you can really leverage.
Ben Ard15:56 — I love that. That's so cool. So Matt, we're almost out of time. These episodes go by quick, and I have loved everything we've talked about today. Any business that's listening to this today saying, okay, we need to take a step in the right direction, we're not really doing much here, what can they do? Not buying a tool or any of that kind of stuff, what can they do to take a step in the right direction, get people involved with their social media presence, sharing their content, getting engaged in the comment section? What can they do today and also prove the value to just move forward in the right direction?
Matt Mullan16:29 — So first step for me, and this is something I always preach, is extreme cross-team collaboration. So what this will do, it will just totally connect you to the content team that's making any said content, any articles that are coming out from the PR team. But beyond marketing, get in touch with your engineers, the people who are creating the product and so forth. Really get to know your industry and your employees that you're going to then be providing the content for. This would also include the sales team, but the sales team has always been the biggest advocates for employee advocacy because they want to sell more. So you just really want to be ingrained in what's happening within the company. So that way you can be in the shoes of said employees. Then you can go back and say, okay, I've got content that will support those roles that I just spoke to. I've got content that's going to go and support the sales team, they'll sell so much easier with X, Y, and Z. The engineers have been working hard on this, and here's a reason why, a new article just came out pivoting our industry as a whole. You just really get to know the minds of your employees more, so that the content that you're providing them is something they're going to want to engage with. Because if you are just giving them content without thinking of who they are, one, you're going to have bad copy, two, no one's going to want to share it, and three, it's just not going to work for you, and you're going to sit there and be like, why is no one sharing everything that I'm adding in there? So start internally first. I mean, this is all mostly internal, but start with your teams and collaborate and get to know your audience, because your audience for this instance is not who your followers are on social media. Your audience is your employees.
Ben Ard18:08 — I love that. That's amazing. Matt, this has been incredible. I love the insights. This gets me excited. I'm sure everyone's going to love this. For anyone listening who wants to reach out and connect with you online, how and where can they find you?
Matt Mullan18:21 — Find me on LinkedIn, Matt Mullan with an A-N. There's hardly any of us. Director of social media. That's where you can find me.
Ben Ard18:29 — Love it. And we will link to Matt's profile directly in the show notes. Thank you, thank you, thank you, Matt. This has been incredible. Really do appreciate the time and insights today.
Matt Mullan18:37 — Thanks for having me, Ben. I could talk for hours on this, but we don't want to hear me ramble.
Ben Ard18:42 — I love it. Maybe we'll have you back on. This is great. Thanks.
Matt Mullan18:44 — Sounds good.
