Companies spend a lot of time looking to identify brand
advocates, but sometimes the best ones are right under their noses. Dynamic
Signal creates software to help turn a company’s employees into brand
advocates. This week, it’s launching eScore, a new tool that identifies and
scores the best brand advocates in an organization.
What it is:
Dynamic Signal occupies a unique place in the ad tech world,
by focusing purely on digital word-of-mouth marketing. Its products help brands
identify communities of brand advocates and give them the materials to go out
and evangelize products to their networks in blogs, social media and day-to-day
conversations. With eScore, companies can now take the first step in first
identifying and rating who the organizations best brand advocates are, as well
as empowering the ones who aren’t as good at it.
How it works:
The eScore system scores an individual using three
components. They are Engagement, which measures how much of the company
marketing content or social media the employee interacts with, Advocacy, which
measures how much of the content is shared and distributed by the employee
across their networks, and Impact, which measures just how valuable those
advocacy efforts are.
By giving each employee a score from 1-100, the eScore tool
helps marketers identify how well the employee is doing in each of those
components, and take steps to help them improve in the areas they are lacking.
It can also be a tool to reward employees who score high, especially in the
Advocacy and Impact categories.
Dynamic Signal CMO Ajay Ramachandran says it’s just as
important to make sure employees are consuming and engaging with the brand’s
content instead of just focusing on sharing it. “Employees don’t become advocates overnight, they first need
to engage with the company and its content before they want to promote it,”
says Ramachandran. “You want to know what makes that employee engaged in the
first place and what business value that initial engagement alone can have on
business metrics, like earnings per share or employee satisfaction.”
eScore
is particularly useful when it comes to company sales staff. The tool generates
reports where employee advocacy in these departments leads to actual revenue
figures in terms of impact. “You can review the detailed metrics that matter
like revenue, leads generated, average deal size, and be able directly
attribute your advocacy efforts back to those KPIs,” says Ramachandran. “This
detailed report will give you insights into the content types that lead to more
forms being filled, which channels are most effective, and which teams or even
individual employees are the strongest advocates.”
Challenges/Limitations:
While
employee advocacy is certainly a great concept, (who better to sell the brand
than the people who know most about it?) measuring these efforts is a double
edged sword. For employees who have built in digital networks and are naturally
skilled at evangelizing the product (i.e. the sales team) an eScore system
makes sense, and competing within that department for higher eScores would
definitely be encouraged. But what if those scores were held up in comparison
to the guys in accounting? Suddenly the top eScores in the company look like an
unrealistic goal to live up to.
Furthermore, measuring brand advocacy efforts
across all employees would mean they would be encouraged to talk about the
company (and be tracked) on their personal Facebook pages, which is great if
you really believe in the brand you work for, but not so great if you want to
keep work out of your personal social media. eScore definitely has its value
within an organization, but only if applied to the right departments and
implemented in a healthy, competitive environment that doesn’t demoralize
employees.
