According to my brand affinity model for influencer marketing, your employees are those that naturally have the most brand affinity for your company because they are an organic part of it. How, though, do you activate your employees as influencers? How does this relate to the concept of employee advocacy? How would this work in regulated industries? And are there any analogies to leveraging employees as influencers that you see in influencer marketing today?
Key Highlights
[02:48] Engaging Employees As Influencers [03:31] How Influencers Are Categorized? [05:44] Entities That Have Most Brand Affinity [06:43] The Way of Looking At Employee Influence [13:26] Why You Should Treat Your Employees Better [15:25] How To Convert Employees Into Influencers [16:33] Legal Issues Related To Employee Advocacy [21:19] The Importance of Employee Influence Training [23:14] Things That Go Into Employee Influencer Training Program [26:49] Leveraging Employees As Part of Content Creation Process
Notable Quotes
They found that how you treat your employees directly impacts job satisfaction, organizational commitment, employee empowerment, supporting your supervisor, and organizational innovation.
These what we call employee advocacy programs have turned more into employee engagement programs. In other words, you don't have to share our content. But we want you to engage with it.
Because just like influencer marketing, we don't want to treat people like they're programmable ad units. We don't want to treat our employees as if they're automatically going to post anything and everything we share with them to their personal networks on social media.
And by providing training, that is putting some skin in the game that if you have employees that love social media, they want to be more active, and by you helping them they'll help you, you can imagine how you're going to get a lot more attention for this program than you were if it's like, hey, share our content.
Episodes mentioned in or related to this one: 165: Influencer Marketing During COVID-19: Still Worth the Investment? 123: Enterprise-Wide Employee Advocacy is a Natural Outcome of Social Business [Sociabble Interview] 121: Everything You Wanted to Know about Employee Advocacy [PostBeyond Interview] 115: How Cathay Pacific Built a Global Employee Advocacy Program 107: Creating Employee Advocates with GaggleAMP 94: Employee Advocacy, Social Selling, and The Missing Alignment Between Sales and Marketing 82: How to Take Your Employee Advocacy to the Next Level: An Interview with GaggleAMP 69: The Definitive Guide to Employee Advocacy
According to my brand affinity model for influencer marketing, your employees are those that naturally have the most brand affinity for your company because they are an organic part of it. How, though, do you activate your employees as influencers? How does this relate to the concept of employee advocacy? How would this work in regulated industries? And are there any analogies to leveraging employees as influencers that you see in influencer marketing today?
Key Highlights
[02:48] Engaging Employees As Influencers [03:31] How Influencers Are Categorized? [05:44] Entities That Have Most Brand Affinity [06:43] The Way of Looking At Employee Influence [13:26] Why You Should Treat Your Employees Better [15:25] How To Convert Employees Into Influencers [16:33] Legal Issues Related To Employee Advocacy [21:19] The Importance of Employee Influence Training [23:14] Things That Go Into Employee Influencer Training Program [26:49] Leveraging Employees As Part of Content Creation Process
Notable Quotes
They found that how you treat your employees directly impacts job satisfaction, organizational commitment, employee empowerment, supporting your supervisor, and organizational innovation.
These what we call employee advocacy programs have turned more into employee engagement programs. In other words, you don't have to share our content. But we want you to engage with it.
Because just like influencer marketing, we don't want to treat people like they're programmable ad units. We don't want to treat our employees as if they're automatically going to post anything and everything we share with them to their personal networks on social media.
And by providing training, that is putting some skin in the game that if you have employees that love social media, they want to be more active, and by you helping them they'll help you, you can imagine how you're going to get a lot more attention for this program than you were if it's like, hey, share our content.
Episodes mentioned in or related to this one: 165: Influencer Marketing During COVID-19: Still Worth the Investment? 123: Enterprise-Wide Employee Advocacy is a Natural Outcome of Social Business [Sociabble Interview] 121: Everything You Wanted to Know about Employee Advocacy [PostBeyond Interview] 115: How Cathay Pacific Built a Global Employee Advocacy Program 107: Creating Employee Advocates with GaggleAMP 94: Employee Advocacy, Social Selling, and The Missing Alignment Between Sales and Marketing 82: How to Take Your Employee Advocacy to the Next Level: An Interview with GaggleAMP 69: The Definitive Guide to Employee Advocacy
Do you or your clients have employees? Have you ever wondered how you might be able to include them as part of your social media marketing? Well, this episode is all for you, we are going to look at how to leverage your employees as true influencers. This is the maximize your social influence podcast with Neal Schaffer, where I help sales and marketing professionals, entrepreneurs, and small business owners, build, leverage and monetize their influence in digital and social media. Welcome to episode number 169 of the maximize your social influence podcast. I don't know how many of you caught it last week, hopefully, you're all signed up to my email list, which you can do by going to Neal Schaffer calm. And there's a widget on the sidebar, on the right sidebar for your desktop or at the bottom if you're in mobile. But you should be able to find a place to enter your email Justin, your first name, and if you do that, you'll be able to receive notifications of the many free educational events that I do throughout the year. Last week was one of them. I was honored to be a guest on the employee advocacy software, platform company posts beyond out of beautiful Toronto, Canada, we did a joint webinar together on employee advocacy is out and employee influencer is in now, maybe some of you have heard the term employee advocacy, it's been around for five or six years, I think there was a big boom on that keyword or it very much trended in marketing circles back in, I'd say 2014 2015 2016. Since then, it's still part of our vocabulary, it's sort of died down a little. I think that a lot of companies have really struggled, they realize the potential, you know, the bigger the company, the more employees you have, the bigger the potential if your employees would share your messages. And that right there is the problem that I believe has faced employee advocacy programs ever since they began. So today and on this webinar, I looked at activating your employees as influencers by looking at employee advocacy, through the lens of influencer marketing, and really applying the trends that I see in influencer marketing, to better engage your own employees. That was the subject of the webinar. And just in case you weren't able to make it. I want to dedicate this episode to really share with you on my journey. This was my first time presenting on this specific topic for those of you that have read the age of influence. And if you haven't, it's for sale everywhere you buy books. I do have one chapter it is a book on influencer marketing, but I do have one chapter on engaging employees as influencers. So with that in mind, let me go through some of the main points that I covered on that webinar, so that you can look at how you can better engage employees as influencers as part of your own marketing. So we know all the benefits of influencer marketing. And we know the trends if you've listened to past episodes. And I'm going to put some of these in the show notes if you're a relatively recent listener specific episodes have done on influencer marketing, the trends that are driving it to be even more important, more popular, despite the COVID 19 pandemic. And fast forward to the way that we categorize influencers. Many of you know that I take a brand affinity model approach to influencer marketing. So traditionally, you look at influencers in terms of number of followers. But now we have nano influencers defined as having at least 1000 followers. And what's really interesting, this is going to be published. In fact, by the time this episode is published, it's going to be published on my blog. And I'm going to share a link to it in the show notes as well, on a report that the social media marketing tool, social bakers recently did a data study. And they found that indeed, nano and micro influencers nano been over 1000 microbeam over 10,000 We're seeing an explosion, especially in the Nano influencer level, especially since the COVID 19 pandemic. So when we look at nano influencers, what a lot of brands are looking for, are people that have actually use their product, right? You don't have to sell them on your product. And it's authentic, because they're already a user. There's no sort of fake ad word Z or whatever you want to call it and you know, inauthentic activities that are going on in the background that try to fool people that they're a real customer. They are a real customer. And that's where we get into my own model. And I'm really glad to hear more and more brands are doing this because when you get to the nano level, obviously, the lower the number of followers, the greater just sheer number of people there are That categorize as that level of influence, and therefore, the greater possibility that it will actually include your customers. Right. So, you know, I think that's only one part of what we look at when we look at the brand affinity. The way I look at it is, there's people out there in social media. As part of an influencer program, if we defined anyone with over 1000 followers, and every any given social network is having an influence, which is the most recent definition, you can imagine, you know, people that have twitter followers that are over 1000, LinkedIn connections that are over 1000, you can see that those who have your most brand affinity now, on Instagram, we're talking mainly about your customers, but outside of Instagram, and it could be Instagram as well. We talked about employees, and we talked about partners as well. resellers, for instance, distributors, marketing partners, these are all people or entities that have the most brand affinity and therefore it is in their best interest that you succeed, right, they're going to be the easiest people to reach out to, in order to collaborate. Obviously, when we go beyond that, and if you haven't heard me talk about this influencer model, or I should say influencer marketing brand affinity model. When we go beyond that, we have our followers and people that mentioned us on social media that have some brand affinity because they're following or mentioning us. And then we get to all the rest. And unfortunately, most brands immediately, they want to work with these all the rest people just because they have a lot of followers, even though they've never potentially even heard the brand. And it turns out to be a very expensive one time transaction that really doesn't fool any of those influencers followers. So this episode is really talking about that employee part, right. And within employees, I introduced on this webinar, a way of looking at employee influence. And when we look at employee influence, we look at those in the company that might have the most influence this is whether they're in social media, or outside of social media, we first look at the CEO, the CEO is usually one of the most outward facing people in the company, if not the most outward facing when we think of Tesla, or Virgin airways, right. And companies are starting to translate that industry influence into Digital Influence. There's a lot of CEOs who are now very influential on LinkedIn. And obviously, if you have a CEO, you don't expect them to share your message, you know, share your photo on Instagram. But there are ways of leveraging their voice and making them more influential on social media, which is going to benefit your entire company. When we get below the CEO, we have the executive team, once again, a lot of them are very active. And if they're socially active, even better. And in fact, companies really do well when people at the top are engaging in social media as well, right? makes it feel good for the people below them that hey, we can do this too. Leading by example, when we get below that we look at the sales and marketing, I suppose we could include corporate communications and public relations, including public affairs. These are entities or people I should say not entities, but they're outside, they're outward facing, they are engaging with people outside of your company as part of their work. Some of them are speaking at industry conferences, some of them are already interviewing the media. Or maybe they're already really, really active in social media, as we find with some savvy b2b salespeople, then we have people that are more behind the scenes, this is going to be perhaps more for a b2b company, but people that are involved maybe in product, product development, research and development. These are the people sometimes we see, you know, directors of it. But these are the people that are not necessarily customer or outward facing. But depending on the company, these people might be already speaking at webinars, or being interviewed by the media, or maybe we speaking at industry conferences, or maybe going together with salespeople on customer visits or taking part in customer phone calls. So once again, it's not part of their daily job, but they're also externally looking and therefore if we can build them into yielding more influence in social media, that's obviously going to benefit them and it's going to benefit the brand. And then we have just the regular general employees. So this webinar that I gave was really not about that executive level, but really about sales and marketing will primarily sales and general employees, the salespeople, this is where we start talking about social selling. And perhaps that's going to be a topic for another dedicated podcast, because I have a lot to say about that and how social selling is really converging with these employee as influencer programs, which hopefully are going to be growing a lot quicker. But let me just start by talking about the problem with employee advocacy, the problem of the use of this term now, I'm going to mention some stats that are probably not going It sounds like a problem to you. But I'll make my point at the end. So don't be confused, right? content shared by employees receives eight times more engagement than content shared by brands. This is why influencer marketing is so powerful people relate more people, people engage more with people than with corporate logos shouldn't surprise any listener to this podcast, an employee advocacy program involving 1000, active participants can generate$1.9 million in advertising value. Now, this is one data point of many. But it's basically saying if you are paying for cost per click on Google or on social media, and you're able to get clicks from your employees posted on social media, there is a value you can associate that there's an ROI that you can measure. And the ROI of that employee advocacy program is way more than or you're going to get a lot more bang for your buck than you do by straight out advertising on a cost per click basis in digital or social media. So there's tremendous value, we also have some data that are presented on before for those of you that might have seen me present that employee advocacy in the past the fact that IBM did this case study of the brand sharing content, and then they have their what they call employee experts share the same content, drive people to their own dedicated landing pages. And they compared the leads generated and how many of those converted. And when they made the conversion, they realized that those that click through from employees post converted seven times greater than when they converted from the brands post. Once again, this is IBM. So we're looking at b2b. And we're looking at b2b sales, b2b sales engineers, sales experts or product experts that are posting this content. And then we have the fact that company followers rarely overlap. We have two data points. This comes from a little while ago, but I think it's still relevant. We have one from Dell one from Cisco. But there was an analysis done on the Twitter followers of the company, compared to who followed their employees on Twitter. And they found that with Dell, there was only an 8% overlap. And when Cisco there was only a 2% overlap, so if you're able to tap into your employees, networks, then you're going to be reaching a whole new network of people, a whole new community, that you might be able to generate interest in your brand with. Now, up until now, you're saying, Well, Neil, where's the problem with employee advocacy? Everything you're talking about? It sounds awesome. What are we missing out on? Why aren't we doing employee advocacy? Well, here's the problem, that and there's some data behind this as well, I actually took this from an academic study, from a, it was actually a study done on employee advocacy in Taiwan, and specifically looking at the Taiwan airline industry. But they found that how you treat your employees directly impacts job satisfaction, organizational commitment, employee empowerment, supporting your supervisor, and organizational innovation. So the problem with employee advocacy is, if you look at it in terms of how you treat your employees, it's the same. And here's where we get into the analogy of the influencer marketing industry. If we reach out to influencers with cut and paste, and say, We want you to post this and that at this time in that time, and please don't veer off from our branding, it doesn't give them a lot of creative freedom to do what they want to do. And in fact, we can say that we're not treating them with the respect that they deserve. As someone who yields Digital Influence. Well, it's the same thing with our employees. If we only look at our employees, as people that are just going to authorize their social accounts, and automatically share all of our content through their social handles, we're not really treating them with the respect that they deserve, right. And if we treat them in that sort of way, it is going to negatively impact our relationship with them. And therefore it is going to negatively impact everything they do at your company. And this is why I've definitely seen over the last few years, these what we call employee advocacy programs have turned more to employee engagement programs. In other words, you don't have to share our content. But we want you to engage with it. We want you to know what we're doing. And they're using that as sort of a way to engage employees, which is all great. But this is why we really need to destroy the term employee advocacy because it stands for the wrong things. And in fact, in the presentation, I had a slide of basically this explosion, this building on fire. And that's really where I think we should put that keyword employee advocacy. Because just like an influencer marketing, we don't want to treat people like they're programmable ad units. We don't want to treat our employees as if they're automatically going to post anything and everything we share with them to their personal networks on social media. So part of it is a mindset issue. And I believe that employee advocacy programs of the past that relied on tools and expected everybody to opt in and share everything is just wrong. And it's going to lead to although you might get some clicks and some benefits. I think that it has the potential with some employees to really treat them the wrong way. And the same with influencer marketing, if you don't treat your influencers the right way, that's half the battle right there, you've already lost a tremendous amount of ROI and goodwill, and it affects that long term relationship. So hopefully, you're with me so far. Because now if you're with me, you're probably wondering next. Well, Neil, how do we convert our employees into influencers? Now, obviously, I'm not talking about everybody becoming a Kim Kardashian or, or a celebrity overnight, that that's not what we're talking about here. But the fact of the matter is, the data shows, and especially with millennials being a majority of the workforce, that 98% of employees use at least one social media site for personal use, of which 50% are already posting about their company, or they have posted about their company. So you probably already have, if everybody of your employees, if they're all on social, you probably have some nano influencers amongst the mix is my assumption. And a lot of them may already be posting about your company without your even knowing it. The problem, though, is and this is a quote from an interview that was done some time ago, but I think still relevant, that 70% of a certain consumer packaged good company, 70% of their employees, said we'd love to talk more about our company, but we don't know what we're allowed to say we don't want to get fired. Now, on the webinar, there were a few people from regulated industries, especially financial services. So you're not going to say when when the FTC comes down on you, you're not going to say, well, Neal Schaffer on his podcast told me to do this. I'll blame Neil. Okay, he, you obviously have to consult your legal team on this issue. There are legal issues, legal issues that are related to compliance and regulatory issues, depending on your industry, but also employment law issues. And also, you should have a social media policy and social media guidelines in place, social media policy, be more of a legalistic document, social media guidelines, just being, you know, best practices as to what you what sort of behavior you expect of your employees and social media. So there is an infrastructure that you need. If you're a big company, this is what you should have. If you're a small company, if you use a service like LegalZoom, I highly recommend that you spend an hour to consult with a lawyer to figure out what are the parameters that you need to follow. Now, the FTC or the Federal Trade Commission, as it's known here in the United States, and I know we have a lot of overseas listeners, I believe, there is no equivalent to the FTC wherever you are, there have been some cases about employee advocacy, there was one in particular, not direct employee advocacy, but indirect employee advocacy. This was an agency called Deutche. It was their la branch. And they basically had their employees on Twitter post about this launch of a new Sony PlayStation game that Sony had hired this agency to do. So Sony hired the agency to help them with their branded launch, but they had their employees talk about it in social media. Now, the FTC alleges that Deutsche la misled consumers by urging its employees to create awareness and excitement about this game on Twitter without instructing employees to disclose their connection to the advertising agency, or its then client, Sony. So this is the type of thing this was a few years ago, right. But this is a type of thing that is possible. So you know, I think it's a simple similar with influencer marketing, if you have influencers posting content, they should have an ad, or hashtag, add, hashtag sponsored. And as we were doing the webinar, Daniel Khufu, who's the director of marketing for post beyond was talking about some of their clients and some other companies like Intel, that have hashtags that relate to the fact that if it has this hashtag, it was tweeted, on our employee on behalf of our employer. So it could just be, you know, hashtag employee of Acme, but having that disclosure is important. Is every company doing this? I don't think so. Right. But I think it's really in your best interest that if someone is posting someone on social media, and is doing it on behalf of someone else, whether it is a sponsored ad, or whether it is on behalf of their employer, that if you have that disclosure, you're going to be okay, that's the key thing. So make sure you have that. Now, if it's a regulated industry, like I said, there might be other issues. So obviously, First Consult your lawyer or legal team. I want to put that aside because it's really an important point when we talk about the legal matters here. But going forward, I'm not going to talk about that anymore. I think I've said what needs to be said. You'll want to confirm that. But I want to now talk about okay, we get the legal parameters. Let's move forward. Well, who are going to be our initial program members? So if they're employees, they may already be talking about us who are they? You know, if we use a social listening tool, who are these people that are mentioning us, right? Once again, we can also in anecdotal Try to understand who are the employees that we hear are really active on social media, or active on Instagram or killing it on LinkedIn, or are tweeting all day long, I don't know whoever they are right. And really, now we get into that social selling part who uses LinkedIn as part of their daily job could be an executive, could be someone in sales, or marketing or PR. But once you have this list of people, you now have a great starting point to say, these are the people that I want to start to build a program, a long standing employee influencer program with and another sort of ninja tactic that I recommend, you need to be using LinkedIn Sales Navigator for this, but for any company in LinkedIn Sales Navigator, you can see the employees that have posted on LinkedIn in the last 30 days. So boom, you can find out your active employees, right from LinkedIn Sales Navigator by spending one minute to do a search to do so. So I highly recommend that you do that as well. Now, you can also sort of promote this internally, hey, we're going to start this program. we'd love if you joined. And you'll probably get other people that may want to join. But I think before that, I would really start with a smaller group, and really get the infrastructure demonstrate not only from a legal perspective, but from a lot of different areas, when I emphasize in the webinar, and what I'm going to emphasize here as well, is the importance of training, employee influence or training. Now, for those of you that read the age of influence, I've mentioned this before on presentations, and maybe in this podcast, when I visited a certain Asian headquarters of a consumer packaged goods brand in Singapore, you know, they were launching a new cosmetic brand. And in their words, if we don't use influencer marketing, how else do we get the word out about our product. And that just shows how advanced the mature influencer marketing is in Southeast Asia and China especially. But what they also said was Neil, were thinking of creating a training program for influencers we have great at the time, they didn't call nano influencers, but they were smaller influencers, who weren't celebrities, but they were lovers of the brand. And they freely talked about the brand, because they were already users. So they're saying, you know, if we could train these users into becoming more influential into creating better Instagram captions, taking better photos, shooting video, we can help them and they'll be able to help us. And it becomes a win win win relationship. And this is really the same thing I think a lot of companies are looking at doing by building I guess in in their terms, it's probably a brand ambassador program. But it's the same approach that I would take for employee influencers, I don't see why you couldn't have one program that covers both your brand ambassadors and your employees. Obviously, if there's information under NDA, then you'll probably want to separate the programs. But I think that concept of training is still really important. When you work at the nano or even below nano level, then your employees are going to say I want to be part of this because I'm going to learn a skill set, it's going to help me with my own branding. Maybe some of your employees already have side hustles, some that you're aware of and some you might not be aware of. It's pretty common these days. Right. So what are the things that go into an employee influencer training program? Well, personal branding is critical. So exercises in branding, online profile development, this is especially important for salespeople and their LinkedIn profile. But it could be for everybody in social media. What about functionality training for each social media network, you might have employees that want to be more active, they want to learn best practices, and you could be the one to provide that to them. What about social networking and engagement best practices, how to build a following or community on social media? How about written content creation, or even blogging, photography, videography, how to curate content, these are things that really savvy influencers have figured out a lot of these, but not everybody's figured out all of them. And by providing training, that is putting some skin in the game that if you have employees that love social media, they want to be more active, and by you helping them they'll help you, you can imagine how you're going to get a lot more attention for this program than you were if it's like, hey, share our content. And every month we're going to give away a $25 amazon gift card or you're going to get you know, the best parking space in the parking lot for a month, you know, whatever companies did to try to incentivize people to join their employee advocacy programs. The way that I talked about that training part is a initial component that I think makes it a lot more interesting for a lot more employees. And this is sort of related to how I recommend you work with employees as influencers. And it's the same thing with working with influencers, right? It comes down to an acronym that hopefully you're familiar with, because I've used it before, but wi I fm, you know what that means, right? If you're in sales, you know what it means? What's in it. For me, because just like every influencer, every employee is going to want something different from that relationship. So, you know, in the past, I'd talk about those old incentives of an employee advocacy program gamification, or badging, or swag, or some internal ranking board, maybe you know, exclusive access to an exclusive lunch or that parking spot, the dedicated parking spot for the biggest employee advocate of the month, I now want you to look at working with your employees exact same as it would if you're working with external influencers. And what are the most popular collaborations today, between brands and influencers? Well, the number one thing is, and I recommend in the age of influence, and everywhere I talk is reaching out one to one with each influencer, asking them how they collab with brands, what they would be looking for in a relationship. And I would ask the employees as well, because they're all going to be different. Obviously, you can give them product in exchange for a shout out or a review. Once again, some companies prevent their employees from giving reviews and social media. So this is where the legal team confirmation is going to come in. But even just by having a picture of that product without doing a review, but mentioning it, my employer was nice enough to give us you know, one three year worth of product, you know, check them out, or whatever it is, you can obviously provide discount code. So if you have employee discounts, why couldn't you provide those to your employer influencers for their community doesn't have to be the same discount, it could be, it could be less of a discount. But it's the same sort of thing that helps the influencer employee influencer, in this case, reward their community. But, you know, going above and beyond this, and it's the same transition we see in the influencer marketing industry, that we're not just looking at employees to amplify our content. But we can actually leverage employees as part of our content creation process, we can engage them to help us create content, whether it's written content, photos, or videos, and we can really make them a part of our content marketing program. And I think this is where you begin to see incredible ROI. Because who knows your product better than anyone, there's so many companies that outsource content creation agencies, when their employees know it best. And when those employees have some influence in social media, and they're great content creators themselves, you have a win win win combination right there, that's going to pay back dividends, not just in the number of clicks your content gets, but in the money you're going to save. And in having more effective content that's going to get you more branded clicks, both on your organic and your paid ads, and even on your shopping cart page and product page if you decide to use that user generated content, or in this case, EGC employee generated content they're so more specifically working with employees for content creation, if it's a b2b company, but even if it's a b2c company, we can interview employees, what are your top tips for, you know, work from home? What are your top haircare tips? What are your favorite recipes? You know, regardless of what industry you're in, there probably is a way to tap into the knowledge and experience that your employees have to help you create that content. You can get customer experience survey data, I showed an example of Express, which is a fashion brand, obviously for those that don't know, but they were interviewing influencers on or asking for survey data on customer experience and how they can improve upon that for influencers specifically, so you can get that sort of data and feedback from this employee influencer program. I talked about gifting product to incite word of mouth, obviously, we can recruit affiliates. So long as employees mentioned that they're an affiliate, they disclose the relationship, I don't see many, you know, employers doing this. So there might be legal aspects. But I would definitely look into that as well. If you have employees that are doing side hustles. Obviously, one of the biggest ways and it's really hard to do now, but you can do it virtually, is by inviting employees to your events, to take photos of the event, tweet the event, become a panelist become a speaker. There's many many opportunities to work employees into your events, so that not only will they help create better content for the event, help to amplify the event, but also helped to recruit more people to join the event by them sharing their involvement with the event before that event ever happens? Well, I think I said event like 10 times there. So now we get to the million dollar question. What can you provide in a collaboration with an employee influencer? And obviously when we work with external influencers, we talk about things like offering them a higher affiliate percentage, product discounts, giving them access to unique products or free products, dedicated customer support, unique experiences, maybe we create content for their blog or their YouTube channel. Maybe we send traffic to them, we backlink to them. We give them a shout out on social, we do a branded content exchange where we actually boost their content or maybe we do a joint event Were we helped build their list? These are things, some of them you could do with an employer influencer. But I would focus on things like that core social media training. I think that's huge. And if you don't have good photographers and good videographers and staff, that's where you want to reach out to local influencers who'd love to help you out? It's gonna cost money, obviously, but it's going to be training that is really going to help your employee influencer program. What about branding and personal branding and advice? Bring in a branding experts to talk about this, this is this is really going to help them and in turn help your program? What about doing photoshoots? With them, hiring photographers to take you? There's a lot of companies that will have employee photo days for your like your LinkedIn profile bio photo, but why wouldn't you do if people are paying money for photoshoots? Why wouldn't the company provide them those so that they can go out there and use those photos to post on social media? If you have a video studio, you can open that up to your employers, employees? And if video becomes something important, why wouldn't you create a video studio that can be done on the cheap, and let your employees use that as part of their social media efforts? Obviously, whenever you want to create content, there should be content opportunities to include them, hey, we're interviewing people on this topic, we're doing a photoshoot on that we're looking for people with an interest in this really open up every you know, open up your entire content marketing editorial calendar, due to your employee influencers, to see where and how they can get involved. And then we have networking opportunities that we can provide them, both inside the company and outside the company in our industry. So you'll notice that not once that I talk about an exchange of money. And also not once that I talk about asking them to amplify our content, because I believe that there is more than a benefit from working with employees outside of that content amplification. But the more you work with them and include them as part of your content, the more they are going to naturally share your content goes the same with outside influencers, the more you work with them, the longer the term the relationship is, the more you convert them to an advocate, where they are going to post without you're asking them to do that. And this is the same with employee influencers, we want to convert them into becoming our true advocates as well. And I believe through this type of program, we can. So I hope this gives you all some food for thought about how to leverage either the employees of your client or your own employees to help you with your marketing efforts. Now, you're not going to find a lot of case studies about this because this is still something relatively new, relatively forward thinking up similar to this brand affinity model of influencer marketing they talk about in the age of influence. It's not based on case studies, it's based on best practices. And we're seeing this emerge. And I believe we're gonna see more and more of these employee influencer programs emerge. Hopefully, by you're listening to this, your company will become one of the leading companies in the space, then. And when you do, I want you to reach out to me because I'd love to interview you and feature you and on my blog in further revisions of the age of influence. But this is something that's really new. But I hope that you'll take the challenge because there are tremendous benefits, as I think you can see here. And you can also see, for those of you that have been listening and read the age of influence, the tremendous analogy between working with external influencers, and working with internal influencers and how you could apply the same concepts to both parties, and really gain tremendous business benefits inside and even outside of marketing. So in full disclosure, this was an hour webinar. And the last part of the webinar really went into leveraging your salespeople as influencers in terms of social selling. So I'm gonna save that for episode number 171, you'll have to tune into that this will be sort of a, a part two of what we talked about today. But hopefully, like I said, this gave you a lot to think about. And I want to thank you for listening this far. I know you know, I enjoy my solo podcasts. I enjoy the interview podcast, the interview podcast, similar to like when I do webinars, I enjoy stopping every five or 10 minutes to answer questions to hear someone else's voice like a moderators voice. And I know listening to one person's voice for a long time, takes an investment in, in energy and in concentration. So I think that's why I try to keep these between 20 and 30 minutes. This one went a little bit long. So that's why I'm going to cut it in two and do the social selling in episode number 171. But hey, you know, thank you so much. If this really resonated with you, I'd really love it. If you were to go to your favorite podcast player, go to the website, go to where my podcast is, and leave me a review and let me know you know, this podcast would not exist without your views, which not only gives me fuel to add to my fire, my passion for wanting to do this and continuing to do this. But obviously it helps spread the word through the way that podcast engine algorithms work and it exposes this this podcast to other people that might find it a value. So for those that have already reviewed this I thank you so much For those who haven't, I'd really appreciate just one minute of your time. And as well make sure that you subscribe. Because we have some great interviews coming up. I hope you'd like the most recent one with ace the gram. We still got interviews with people like Jay Baer, Joe Polizzi, Carla Johnson and others coming out that I don't think you're going to want to miss. All right, everybody. I'll stop it here. Wherever you are in the world. Make it a great virtual social day. And thanks again for being one of my podcast listeners. Bye bye, everybody.