The Importance of Employee Advocacy Programs with a QuickFix Model

Employee Advocacy is the promotion of an organization by those working for them. It helps to boost the brand by having its employees share information on their personal social media platforms (Newberry 2019). This is helpful for the brand because if your employees share that they are passionate about what they work with, more people will see the product and be more likely to invest. Your employees can reach people your brand may be incapable of due to different followers and/or different platforms. The employee advocacy program standardizes how employees boost the brand on their social media and will make it easier (Newberry 2019).

“With an employee advocacy program, you can create guidelines, resources, and rewards” (Newberry 2019). It helps to narrow down what employees should be posting and give them an easier way to do it. This could also benefit the employee. If the company stands behind the employee advocating for them on social media, they will gain a reputation. This will also help with selling opportunities and various rewards the company may offer (Newberry 2019).

It is so important to make the advocacy easy. If it is hard to try to fit the brand into a regular post based on guidelines, it is being done wrong. Create a goal for your team to promote and give them the freedom to do it. Employee advocacy programs are important to help boost your brand and add to the fun, creative side of social media.

After discussing the importance of an employee advocacy program. Here is a quick fix example of what Kennesaw State University SOCM professors can do to advocate for KSU.

Purpose: These guidelines provide the steps that must be considered when representing Kennesaw State online in an employee’s capacity while using social media.

Applicability: KSU professors should follow procedures, discussed later, following guidelines for posts. They should be boosting the brand, not tearing it down. These procedures will not apply to their online activities while not on duty, however, they should continue to keep a good image of KSU in all posts. KSU employees should not misuse their power.

Audience: The target audience should be friends that could have an interest in teaching, any employee, and other people using social media on behalf of KSU.

Background: Social media platforms like Instagram are starting to offer a wide scope of viewers of all ages. Students at KSU could show their parents or their parents could be on Instagram looking at content KSU is putting out from their staff. This could help to get a lot of attention and support from various people groups.

Procedures: When employees participate on KSU’s behalf, they should follow the guidelines below in order to maintain professionalism and energy that they would if they were speaking at a conference.

·      Respect your time and effort and obtain approval: Consider what is needed to participate and understand how important it is to KSU

·      Identify your KSU affiliation: Explain why you are affiliated with KSU and why you enjoy being affiliated

·      State facts, not opinions: Do not emphasize opinions. Show the factual side of why you enjoy working for the company.

·      Identify supporting sources: Give access to websites and other accounts on social media to help people research and invest.

·      Protect nonpublic information: Do NOT share private information publicly.

·      Ethics apply: You are bound by the Standards of Ethical Conduct

·      Share experiences and best practices: Make it fun, bring it into your everyday life, show what you like to do with the resources KSU has given you!

Below is an example post for Instagram.