Employees as Brand Ambassadors — How UGC Empowers HR Professionals

The labor market is tight, and top talent has unlimited choices for whom they work. In fact, many of your current employees are a lunchbreak away from their next big opportunity. This is especially true for millennials, whose experiences growing up have made them leery of corporate promises. That’s why it’s important to laser-focus your efforts on employee experience and retention — otherwise things can get very expensive, very fast.

When you factor in all the costs, losing an employee is expensive.

What’s the solution? Your company (your brand) must find authentic ways to differentiate and create personalization at scale that is compelling to existing and prospective employees. After all, the reality is employees and their personal brands have significantly more power than traditional brand marketing — they are your company’s greatest asset and have the most socially credible point of view. The goal is to mobilize all employees as brand evangelists and use social media to keep your business transparent and real.

That’s why user-generated content (UGC) — all of the tweets, posts, images, and videos found on the social channels — is one of the hottest and most powerful marketing tools out there.

A new era, a new opportunity

According to a recent HuffPo article, it’s all about growth (most employees value personal growth and career opportunity over income and job security), impact (employees want socially conscious companies), and care (employees want a nurturing, respective work environment). But here’s the big challenge — HR is not revenue generating, so you have to be extremely creative with little money.

With limited budget and resources, how do you create engaged employees and then, ultimately, turn them into advocates? This is where UGC and Adobe Experience Manager Livefyre can play a big part. Livefyre makes all the UGC magic happen, automatically, for a surprisingly small investment.

Livefyre — the power behind the scenes

Livefyre enables you to search Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and other social channels by hashtag and/or keyword, and benefit from the power of Smart Tags powered by Adobe Sensei to quickly and automatically find the employee UGC you need — whether it’s three pieces or 30 — and promote it. This enables you to present employee sentiment safely back to the world, creating authentic experiences that reflect positively on your company for prospective employees, investors, partners, customers, and others.

Plus, it natively integrates with Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) and can be implemented with Adobe Target, which your company may already be using. Don’t have AEM or Target? No problem. You can be up and running in no time using Livefyre as a standalone solution, and then later integrate as you grow your Adobe stack.

UGC — the ultimate marketing tool

Thanks to the combination of technology, such as Livefyre, and ubiquity of social media, UGC has become one of the most affordable (and easiest) ways to engage employees and build your brand internally. The key is to ensure everything posted is truly authentic and your employees’ personalities come shining through.

Here’s how you can make UGC your competitive advantage:

1. Nurture employees. Get them excited about becoming advocates, train them on social media best practices, and give them a hashtag to spread the word.

2. Get employees to post about cool things such as an employee’s first day of work, events, product launches, philanthropic causes, favorable media announcements about the company, and more.

3. Use Livefyre to search social channels using hashtags or keywords to find the content you’re looking to highlight.

4. Stream the curated UGC into Livefyre visualizations (media walls, film strips, carousels) to:

• Your public-facing website.
• Your intranet — and don’t forget to add tons of interaction to internal and external websites with polls, comments, etc.
• The physical screens around the office — employees love to see their posts highlighted.

An example of employee UGC (including polls and comments) posted on a company intranet, thanks to Livefyre.

Adobe is not just a proponent, we’re a case study

At Adobe, we practice what we preach. We developed the hashtag #adobelife so employees can share their experiences in an authentic way. And during Adobe Life Orientation, new employees are encouraged to share a social media post about their “day one.”

Here are some examples:

Examples of how Adobe’s communications team uses #adobelife and Livefyre to find, curate, and stream content that employees and customers have posted.

Now imagine what Livefyre and UGC can do for your company and HR initiatives.

Contact us to learn more about Adobe Experience Manager Livefyre.