Well, not exactly. But a discerning fisherman knows that tactics must be adjusted to conditions, and one lure doesn’t fit all fish.

I just returned from our annual fishing trip in a remote corner of Canada with my three sons. No fast food, no malls, no traffic –not even cars. To get to Pipestone Lake, you go by either a pontoon-plane or, as we do it, portage in by boat. Spending a week on crystalline water surrounded by majestic pines, white birch, towering granite cliffs, and the occasional bald eagle, bear or moose makes a great setting for unwinding – and thinking.

And a lot of our thinking this week was about strategies for catching fish. For we arrived at our lodge slogging through a torrential downpour. Nearly a week of rain left the lake more than a foot-and-a-half above normal and caused widespread flooding across the area. Aside from the high water, the rain and colder temperatures dropped the water temperature by over ten degrees in a couple of days – a change in the environment that does not bode well for fish and their eating habits. Pipestone Lake is part of an expansive chain of lakes with thousands of acres of water to navigate. So while there was nothing we could do about the weather or the high water, we could adapt our fishing tactics to what we thought would best fit the conditions: which species would be our best bet – northern pike, walleye, muskie, bass or lake trout? And where to fish for them – deep or shallow, along the shoreline, in the channels or over weed beds? What lures to use, and so on.

But a week isn’t long enough to fully disengage from Silicon Valley, so I found my thoughts drifting to content discovery and curation. And it occurred to me that the challenges we were facing in Canada – matching fishing strategies to the prevailing conditions – was a problem that businesses – and marketers – face everyday. Of course, rarely would a content marketing plan revolve around floods or water temperatures. But certainly the variables that influence the success or failure of a content marketing plan are more complex than weed beds or fishing lures, and the content appetites and consumption habits of a brand’s target audience are arguably less predictable – and more dynamic – than the diet of a northern pike.

The savvy marketing professional understands that they have neither have the bandwidth nor the budget to create enough original content to saturate all of the haunts of their intended audience. And they realize that even if they could, buyers are increasingly more discriminate in recognizing self-serving product propaganda from unbiased content that educates and elucidates. These audiences are all over the web: social networks including Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest and many more, and multiple web site or micro-sites, and mobile applications, or email newsletters and digests – and, well, you get it – the list is exhausting. Exhausting not only in number, but in diversity. So it’s not simply a case of writing a blog and pumping it out on all of your content channels; the bait that works trolling for lake trout in 60 feet of water would be a horrible choice when trying to catch a bass under a brush pile on the shoreline. Just as using the same content on Facebook and LinkedIn – one an appropriate venue for culture or lifestyle content about your company, the other an excellent choice for content about business trends and developments – would not be a great choice. And then, to make it even more challenging, these audiences habits and preferences are changing, just like the weather. But a successful brand tracks and adjusts to these changes.

Trapit provides this savvy marketer access to the range of high quality content, relevant, third-party content to cover the broad demands of all the channels where the target audience frequents. Flexible, and easy-to-tailor discovery to find the appropriate content for specific venues. Check it out – just click on the “Show me Trapit!” button below.

And by the way, in case you’re interested, we found success fishing for muskies lurking under fallen trees along the shoreline. And going deep for lake trout along underwater ridgelines. I wish your own content marketing strategies equivalent results!

–Gary

More posts by Gary:

Image credit: My son Tom showing the results of a successful fishing “content” plan

Image via

Four leaf clovers are rare and very hard to find. They are symbols of luck and, as such, the bearer is better off for having found one. These little gems do exist, but it takes patience to sort through thousands and thousands of three leaf clovers to find one – an arduous task. The largest four leaf clover collection is held by George J Kaminski, who single-handily collected 72,927 – and he found them within the grounds of a prison in Pennsylvania. I guess he had a lot of time on his hands. Though as a career criminal, one might question his luck.

As marketers we face a new – but similar – challenge. We need to provide our customers and prospects with information that is revealing, unique, and engaging – content that must be relevant and timely. Finding relevant content can be difficult and expensive. There is just too much data out there, both in the public domain and in your company’s private domains. As we all know searching for information using today’s search engines is time consuming and not always rewarding, and finding those little four-leafed gems is even harder. And you probably don’t have as much time on your hands as George.

Our audience wants and expects us to help them understand and learn what to buy and why they should buy it. In today’s world of instant information, we know that when a prospect comes to us with an intent to purchase, they have already done their research and narrowed the number of suppliers to just a few. You can bet that they are already at least half way through their buying decision cycle. It is up to us as marketers to ensure that our brand and our story is the one that is most compelling so that we capture their interest and have an opportunity to win their business. Remember, it is not the leads that we know we lost that are most troubling – at least we learn something. Rather, it is instead losing a lead we never had the chance to convert.

Discovering relevant content is everything. Curating content from sources other than your own is critical. Delivering content in a manner that your audience wants is fundamental. As a marketer you must design and execute a content strategy that is rich with the information that compels your audience to take a deeper look at your product. In short, since your audience does not likely have George Kaminski’s time on their hands, you need to figure out how to make it fun and easy to find those four leaf clovers that make you stand out in a field crowded with ordinary three-leafers.

The challenges that you face are time, volume, cost and relevancy. At Trapit we can help with all of this. Our new Content Curation Center will allow you to discover, trap, and deliver the content you need to stay ahead of the crowd. We reduce the time and costs associated with human curation while ensuring that you are finding those gems that keep your audience coming back. And this is not about luck – it is about applying the right solution to help you rapidly and efficiently solve these challenges.

Come and visit us at Trapit and see how fun we make it to help you find your four leaf clovers.

-Pat

I recently had the great pleasure to chat with one of our beta users, Doug Peterson. Doug is a retired high school teacher, current technology consultant, and sessional Instructor at the University of Windsor. Doug discovered Trapit after finding Zite. He’s drawn to services that provide serendipitous discovery because they have the potential to introduce him to unknown, high quality sources of information.

Without ways to encounter the unknown it’s easy to get into a rather static information consumption pattern (you read the same newspaper over coffee every morning). Doug suggested that while this doesn’t necessarily leave you uniformed as to what’s going on, it doesn’t provide much opportunity to find new perspectives as to what’s going on. Outlets generally report in anticipated ways over time and, as many lifelong learners should agree, variety is the spice of life.

I’ve been mulling over Trapit’s potential as a resource for educators (especially after our @TheEduTrap was recognized as a high quality resource on education), so I was curious to get Doug’s take on that idea as a teacher from the Ontario, Canada public school system. Says Doug:

In addition to being a good starting point for research, Traps are a useful way to follow a topic over time and provide a good way to easily compare and contrast various types of resources and their particular take on a topic (which appeals to me especially as an information literacy dork).

Imagined Assignment: Follow the online media coverage of the Syrian Uprising. How are various outlets discussing this event? Select sources that seem to have the highest quality information about this event and justify your selections. Additionally, how does the media coverage evolve over time?

One of the most valuable things about getting to talk to any of our users is getting the chance to ask for constructive feedback (fresh eyes are like gold when you work so closely with something). Doug’s main criticism of Trapit was that most of the resources coming through his traps seem to be United States based. He wanted a wider international spread, and in particular, more Canadian sources, since this supports a wider variety of perspectives (and greater serendipity).

After assuring him that we should have Canadian newspapers pretty well covered, discussing the unfortunate US centric nature of English language sources on the web, I promised to make a targeted push to find Canadian blogs. We’ve always envisioned Trapit as a tool for an International audience and we’re working hard to make sure our sources support that.

Thanks again Doug.

-Laura

Image via Komarketing Associates, LLC.

“There’s only so much I can do.” It’s probably the most common lament out of my mouth, and even though my case is probably not identical to yours, it’s a sentiment we can all relate to.

You see, I’m a scientist — an astrophysicist — and a science writer. When news and stories about the Universe on both the largest and most fundamental scales break, there are a slew of individuals and organizations who look to me to cut through the noise and separate what’s true (and worth listening to) from what’s skewed, sensationalized or an outright scam. Yet no matter how much content I produce myself, even as an expert in the field, I could never cover it all.

But my focus isn’t on being the first to cover a story, it’s on being the highest-quality option out there. I want to frame the story properly, around the context of what else is going on. I want to talk about the limits of what’s known and the nuanced possibilities of what’s next. I don’t want to have the same, middle-of-the-road content that’s quick and cheap to put out; my brand is quality and trust. If someone asks me how to position themselves as a trusted expert, there’s never an alternative to actually being an expert and focusing your efforts on quality.

But that doesn’t mean you have to sacrifice covering the stories that you yourself don’t have time to do justice to. Just because there’s a limit to what you yourself can write and create given all your other constraints doesn’t mean you can’t be a trust-building thought leader when it seems that you can’t keep up; it means that you need to embrace letting others do the dirty work for you. And that means seeking out and sharing the high-quality content (by your expert standards) created by others.

It’s a move that seems counterintuitive at first glance. But the hard truth is you have a finite amount of time and resources at your disposal, and there’s a finite amount of content that you could (and should) generate yourself. But part of being an expert is being able to recognize quality when you see it, and a judicious choice of good stories to share can help fill-in-the-gaps both when something is beyond the limits of your resources and also when something is even slightly beyond your own personal expertise!

There are far too many pseudo-experts out there using smoke-and-mirrors to draw attention, but eventually the lack of substance catches up with them all. You’re not one of them, so why would you use the same cheap tricks and tactics they do, when you could be building trust instead? When you speak with that established foundation of quality behind you, the world will listen to what you have to say. And because you knew what your limits were — and you knew how to deal with it — you can step up and say your piece when it counts the most.

-Ethan

Employee advocacy is a no-brainer for certain departments. Marketers want to boost the company’s share of voice. Employee advocacy can help. Sales professionals want to engage customers. Social can help with that, too. HR teams want to build a strong employer brand and attract new hires. Employee advocacy can check those boxes.

For customer-facing departments, the business case practically writes itself. But what about your company’s engineers? Many of them would be great advocates for your company. But how in the world do you get them to participate in your employee advocacy program?

Believe it or not, it’s not as hard as it might seem. It’s all about how you frame things. Below are three quick tips that will help you turn your engineers into advocates.

1. Spend Time with the Engineering Team to Learn about Their Goals

“Just because” is never a good reason to use social. When working with engineers–or any employee for that matter–you must map social networks to established goals. Those goals might be related to leading people, connecting with other people in your organization, and interacting with influencers outside your organization.

It’s tempting to cram all engineers into a box by treating all engineers the same. But as Miguel Rodriguez, Senior Manager of Social Media at MarkLogic, has pointed out, companies have a variety of engineers, who have different roles and different goals. Sales engineers are different from, say, front-end developers, which are different from back-end developers. And each group of engineers will have different goals.

Take sales engineers as an example. Since they work closely with customers, they will want to know what your buyers are saying, and they will want to understand how they can use social to build relationships with their customers. Your back-end developers may not share those same goals.

So, take the time to speak with the various engineering teams. Learn about their goals. Then, map their goals to specific social activities. You might want to create something like this:

2. Start with Listening

Regardless of an engineer’s role at the company, listening will be a fundamental component of their social activities. Listening can help engineers build relationships with other members of their team, engage with influencers, learn about the industry, unearth information about competitors’ product updates, and learn more about their fields of expertise.

There’s something for everyone.

To understand how engineers will listen on social, you will need to do some research. Your technical teams won’t necessarily follow the same people you follow, nor will they care about the same Twitter hashtags. While a social media manager might care about the #SocBiz hashtag and follow people like Jay Baer, a front-end developer might want to skim posts that use the #UX hashtag and follow people like Addy Osmani.

While Google is a good place to start your research, it can’t tell you everything. Try speaking with a few engineers who are socially savvy, and understand how they use LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook for professional purposes.

3. Tailor Your Training Based on Job Function and Social Savviness

Wouldn’t life be simpler if you could create a one-size-fits-all training program for your company? I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but that’s a pipe dream.

Training needs to be tailored to the individuals and their goals. Often times, it’s best to design training around job functions. Why? Because back-end engineers will have similar goals to other back-end engineers, and marketers will have similar goals to other marketers.

For instance, an engineer may not need to know look for buying signals or shape the buyer’s journey by sharing content. That’s something a salesperson will care about. So, does it make sense to train sales reps and engineers at the same time? Probably not.

Likewise, does it make sense to train complete novices alongside advanced social users? Probably not. And be careful not to fall into a mental trap. Being able to write code does not make someone an instant genius on all things related to technology, including social networks. Just as your HR teams will have varying levels of social expertise, so, too, will your engineering teams. That’s why it’s important to assess the social maturity of your employees before you launch your training program. You don’t want your power users to get bored and drop out, nor do you want eager novices to be overwhelmed.

Don’t Sell Your Employee Advocacy Program Short

While it makes sense to start your employee advocacy program with customer-facing groups of employees, your employee advocacy program does not have to stop there. There’s a lot of potential to expand your program to other job functions like your engineers. You just have to find ways to connect the dots between their business goals and social media.

For more tips on launching an employee advocacy program, here are a few resources that you might enjoy:

The doctor is in! While he doesn’t make us call him “Doctor Siegel,” Trapit’s new science and health editor holds a Ph.D. in theoretical cosmology. Trapit let me take a break from keeping up with the Kardashians to Skype with Ethan about his new role.

Ethan (we call him by his first name) comes to Trapit from Lewis & Clark College where he must have been the only professor on campus wearing a kilt. He joins Trapit with the intention of spreading high quality science and health information far and wide.

“Science and health is the type of vertical that needs this technology. There is a whole lot of information out there and people don’t know who to trust. These are big issues: Autism, Evolution, HIV/AIDS, the list goes on. In science, there is a right answer. Not everyone’s voice deserves equal time. My goal in joining Trapit is to vet everything and promote the legitimate sources in my traps.”

Ethan found his calling while working on his post-doc research, starting a personal science blog in January 2008.

“I felt isolated among only fellow scientists. I wanted to reach a larger audience.”

It started with a simple question: “How do you make a black hole?” The question and corresponding blog post was interesting enough to make it on Stumbleupon. A few initial hits turned into 1000 overnight, and Ethan was hooked on his newfound following. Within a year, his blog had up to 400 visits a day, which is when ScienceBlogs(owned by National Geographic) invited him to be a part of its network.

Today Ethan’s blog, “Starts with a Bang,” is among the most popular science blogs on the web. Perhaps its large following is due, in part, to Ethan’s dedication to covering the most compelling and controversial topics in the science community.

“These are topics that affect public health, safety, and people’s understanding of how things work. There is an incorrect idea on the Internet that science is ‘sometimes wrong’ or one person’s opinion is just as good as fact-based science. A scientific theory is not an opinion; a theory requires a burden of proof. I want to clarify to my readers, at the very least, the best answer we have right now. Science isn’t something that ends.”

I may be Trapit’s new Entertainment Editor, but even I can understand neutrinos when Ethan is explaining them to me. Watch him simplify the mysteries of science for the Portland’s local TV news. Thankfully, my areas of expertice, i.e. Ashton & Demi’s divorce, don’t require the same level of translation!

When he’s not fighting for good science, Ethan is collaberating with his wife Jamie to renovate an old school bus into an off-grid mobile home. Their dog, Cordelia, will be along for the ride.

Want to discover the best in science? Read Ethan’s first Trap of the Day on Vaccination.

—Whitney

Props to marketers. You’re some of the most resourceful people in the business world. Whenever a problem arises, you find a solution that would make MacGyver envious.

Unfortunately, many of these solutions are temporary fixes – rather than long-term solutions. And no where is this more evident than with employee advocacy and social selling programs.

Many enterprise companies understand that they need content for their advocacy and social selling efforts. So, what do they do? Their marketing teams spend hours compiling a Word document, which they circulate among their employees via e-mail.

If you’re a forward-thinking marketer, chances are good that you graduated from this strategy a long time ago. But if you haven’t, here are three reasons why you should ditch your Word documents.

1. Your Current Process Is Extremely Inefficient

When our customers come to us, many find themselves spending between two and three hours, daily, doing the following:

• Finding content on the internet that will be of interest to their sales teams, marketers, etc.
• Copying URLs and creating shortened links
• Copying the shortened links and pasting them into a Word document
• Copying the article’s headline into a Word document
• Writing sample messages to accompany those URLs in the Word document
• Sending e-mails to their employees with the Word document

That’s a lot of masochistic work. Wouldn’t it be nice to make the process more efficient? Using a platform built for content discovery and content storage eliminates those inefficiencies. (Imagine what you could do with an extra hour or two every day!)

With the right technology, you can swiftly find content that will interest your audience. Then, once you have found the article, you can write a sample message that your employees can you use on social media – without copying and pasting the link or manually shortening the URL. And you don’t have to compose an e-mail to your employees, letting them know that there’s more content available. The platform will do all that for you.

2. You’re Hindering Your Program’s Success

For your social selling or employee advocacy program to work, you need people to participate. Without adoption, no one will amplify your reach or build trust with buyers.

By e-mailing Microsoft Word files to your employee advocates, you’re making life difficult for them. Once your employees receive the Word document, they have to read the article. Then, they have to copy and paste the URL and sample message into Twitter or LinkedIn. Then, they have to share the article.

By forcing your employees to copy and paste the article to their preferred social networks. you’re creating more work for them. Where there’s more work, there are lower adoption rates, and where there are lower adoption rates, there are lower results.

By investing in an advocacy platform, you can make your employees’ lives easier. With a click of the button, they can share the latest content. No copying and pasting. No needless friction.

3. Content Disorganization Is Annoying

Okay, let’s say that you’re an advocate, and let’s say that you regularly read all the articles sent to you. But you don’t share everything that the marketing team sends to you.

Then, one day, you’re speaking with a prospect, and you realize, “Hey! I read an article related to this prospect’s pain point! I should send it to her!” But wait! How do you find the article in the giant black hole that is your e-mail inbox?

Good luck.

By using an employee advocacy platform that incorporates a content library, your employees can easily find the content that they’re looking for.

The Bottom Line

Microsoft Word is great. E-mail is great. But combining Microsoft Word and e-mail will not be enough for your employee advocacy or social selling strategy. As your program matures, you’ll want to look past Microsoft Office and find a product designed for managing your employee advocacy program.

Your organization will appreciate it greatly.

-Mark

Microsoft Office and E-mail Can’t Do It All…

Find out how Trapit can help your marketing team build a more efficient employee advocacy program.

Your CMO walks by you in the hallway and asks, “So, how’s the employee advocacy program going?”

“It’s going great!” you respond. “One of our employees got 78 retweets on his first tweet!”

“That’s fantastic! How many new leads have we generated thanks to our advocates?”

“Uhh…” you stammer. “A lot?”

Shoot. You can rattle off how many retweets and likes your employees are getting. But you have no clue how many leads you have.

Sound familiar? You’re not alone. 60% of marketers struggle to show the ROI of their social media efforts, and it’s time to fix this problem.

Choosing the Metrics That Matter

Since marketers can measure a lot of things, they have to decide which metrics matter. Every marketer has an opinion about which numbers are important, and some marketers even get into heated debates over their opinions.

But here’s the thing: Instead of arguing about which metrics matter, modern marketers should ask themselves, To whom does this metric matter?

Not everyone in your marketing organization – let alone your company – cares about the same numbers. It’s the job of modern marketers to tailor their reports and to use the right numbers, in the right context. Let’s take a look at some concrete examples below.

When Tactical Metrics Matter

Many employee advocacy platforms provide you with tactical metrics. They help you understand how many people clicked on a link, or how many people your advocates reached, or how many people retweeted a tweet.

Tactical measurements are great for:

• Your advocates, who want to increase their visibility on social channels.
• Your curators, who want to ensure that their content selections are resonating with the right audiences.
• Your trainers and program managers, who are trying to standardize best practices for your advocates.

To be sure, tactical metrics are especially important at the beginning of an employee advocacy program, when you’re trying to establish best practices. If people aren’t clicking on your advocates’ links when you have 50 advocates, you might want to rethink your approach to social sharing before you enlist 100 advocates. Perhaps you need different content or snazzier headlines.

When Revenue Metrics Matter

That said, while tactical metrics have value, they have their limits, as well.

CMOs and other executives aren’t interested in tactical measurements. (That’s why some marketers refer to tactical metrics as “vanity metrics.”) CMOs want more strategic metrics – ones that can be mapped onto the sales funnel and be assigned dollar values.

For example, you might want to track:

• How many new leads were generated because of your employee advocacy efforts.
• How much pipeline was influenced by your advocates.
• How many of those opportunities closed.
• How much revenue was generated as a result.

Revenue-based metrics are what matter to your CMO, and ultimately, these are the metrics that will justify your advocacy expenses to your company’s executive team.

Unfortunately, revenue-related numbers happen to be the numbers that many employee advocacy vendors ignore. As a result, many program managers have trouble justifying their advocacy programs to their CMOs. Try not to let this happen to you.

Bottom Line

Here’s the bottom line: Find an employee advocacy platform that can help you measure tactical metrics and revenue metrics. Both types of numbers are important.

So, as you’re evaluting employee advocacy solutions, remember that your advocates in engineering typically aren’t thinking about leads, but getting retweets and starting conversations are important to them. In other words, your engineers care about tactical metrics.

At the same time, you don’t want to look foolish when your CMO asks you about leads, pipeline, and deals. So, be sure to give your executives revenue-based metrics for your employee advocacy program.

If you want more help demonstrating the ROI of your employee advocacy program, contact us. We’d be happy to help.

Until next time,

-Mark

Additional Resources

I recently read an article titled “Marketers regularly use over 100 software programs.” When I saw the headline, I paused and thought, “How can that be true?” After reading the article, I got a better appreciation of his intended message. There’s an abundance of software solutions that we can purchase to help us do our jobs.

Let’s just focus on content marketing. There are hundreds of companies in market serving the needs associated with content marketing. As marketers, we look for a “best of breed” offering. Ideally we want something that can provide a complete “end to end” workflow so that our ROI objectives can be achieved without integrating disparate tools.

We all have a slightly different slant on what is meant by content marketing, but no matter: content marketing is our attempt to find the most efficient/economical way to deliver the right content at the right time through the right channel so we can engage, retain, and build trust with our audience.

To find the right solution, you must identify the key components that will meet the needs of your content marketing team. There are five key components associated with a content marketing workflow:

1. Content discovery
2. Content curation
3. Content distribution
4. Content amplification
5. Content analysis

1. Content Discovery

Today it is nearly impossible to create enough content to be and stay relevant. With so many channels of distribution, a continuous flow of highly relevant content is now table stakes. If you are not keeping your audience interested in what you are saying, you can bet that someone else is.

Discovery is different from curation. Many point solutions say they can curate content. But they forget to tell you something important: You need to “bring your own content.” In other words, you need to find and create your own content for distribution.

Robert Rose recently remarked:

And trust Robert when he says it is “technologically difficult,” which is why so many companies don’t really provide the power of discovery aside their curation capabilities.

2. Content Curation

Curation is about choosing the right content to share with your audience. It is also about making sure that the content is optimized to create the experience you want.

Curation is an art. It takes a keen creative mind to decide what content to share, when to share it, and where to share it. The capability to co-mingle created and curated content in your workspace, and then choose the appropriate content predicated on audience and intent – that is what curation is all about.

Many point solutions will say that they “facilitate curation.” But how many provide seamless discovery from the Internet, as well as from behind corporate firewalls? How many provide an easy taxonomy to organize and prepare the content for curation? And how many – in the same interface – allow the curator the ability to make all the required edits and annotated comments to ensure the content is optimized for maximum impact?

At Addvocate-Trapit, we can do that.

3. Content Distribution

Distribution of content seems simple. However, there are so many ways to reach your audience. We have Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, email, web properties, and – let’s not forget – TV, Billboards, radio, etc. It seems never-ending, if not completely overwhelming.

“Hunt, cut and paste” is just no longer a viable option. Social media publishing alone requires regular frequency. What organization can afford to search, cut, and paste to Twitter 10-15 times/day, Facebook and LinkedIn 5 times/week, and Pinterest 10 times/week? With content that is meaningful to the intended audience?

Make your life easy, efficient, and effective. Find a solution that gives you “push of the button” publishing – from one application.

4) Content Amplification

Fill your organization with “everyday” marketers. Leverage the power of your people to get your voice heard.

Employee advocacy is real, and it should be an integral part of your marketing strategy. Some organizations decide to empower their employees to leverage their personal social media networks and encourage them to share content. Other organizations prefer to moderate the content that their employees share. Either way, they recognize the need to amplify the brand voice through employee advocacy.

The most effective application will allow you to choose the approach with which your company is comfortable, while taking advantage of the content that was discovered and curated by that same application. So whether you want marketing-discovered and curated content, or employee discovered and curated, note that the best solution will offer both.

5) Content Analytics

And let’s not forget ROI. We need to know how our content is performing. It is important to see how much engagement we are creating with the content that we publish and share. We also need to measure the effectiveness of our employee advocacy activity to ensure that our teams are engaged and their content is being acknowledged.

This is really all about building our brand, cultivating awareness, and generating leads. Metrics are a key part of any great content marketing solution. Without this, it is virtually impossible to gauge the effectiveness of your content marketing plan.

In Case You Missed It…

This week Addvocate and Trapit came together in a very important merger to deliver the first complete content marketing solution. Providing marketers what they need to discover, curate, publish, amplify, and analyze relevant, personalized content is our mission. We hope you agree that we do it best.

Want to Learn More?

You can read more about how Trapit works and how Addvocate works. If you’re interested in either product, feel free to contact us to request more information.

We look forward to hearing from you soon!

-Pat Hume, President of Addvocate-Trapit

Related Links:

How do you get your employees to adopt your advocacy program?

Many bloggers and vendors want employee advocacy to appear easy. Your employees will participate if you turn social sharing into a game, they tell you. Make it a competition, they advise you. Assign points. Create a leaderboard, and whoever shares the most, wins a few swanky perks.

But do points and leaderboards work for employee advocacy? Does gamification really promote the adoption of your program? Let’s take a look at what the research tells us.

What Is Gamification?

In a nutshell, gamification happens when you take elements of a game and plop them into a non-game context.

For example, let’s imagine that you’re in second grade again. You’re learning your multiplication tables, and at the end of each week, you have to take a test. During the first week, the test involves multiplying by two. Two times two equals four. Two times three equals six.

Easy, right? You’re totally going to get a 100%, and when you do, the teacher rewards you with a gold star on the classroom leaderboard.

After acing the twos, you progress to multiplying by three. Then, by four. Then, by five. Finally, when you can multiply by 10, not only do you get a gold star, but you get one of your teacher’s famous chocolate chip cookies. And if you’re the first person to get a 100% on the 10 test, you get one chocolate chip cookie, every day, for a whole month.

That’s gamification in all its yumminess.

The Research: Does Gamification Work for Employees on Social Media?

Gartner predicted that, by 2015, gamified services for marketing would be as big as Facebook, eBay, or Amazon. Yet, despite the hype, as of 2014, there were no empirical studies on gamification in marketing – much less on employee advocacy, specifically.

Bummer.

So, how can we tell if gamification will work for employee advocacy? Well, researchers have looked at gamification on internal social networks, and they have asked a similar question: How do you get employees to use social networks for business purposes?

IBM created something called the Beehive. It’s a network that allows IBMers to form deeper connections with the people they work with, keep in touch with their friends and colleagues, and reconnect with people who worked on projects with them in the past.

Of course, IBM wanted people to use Beehive. (Why else would you spend money creating the network?) And given the buzz around gamification, IBM was keen to know if a point system could encourage people to use Beehive. So, the company did an experiment. The researchers created a point system, and they gave one set of Beehive users access to the point system. The other set of users didn’t have a point system.

Here’s what IBM found: When employees could see how many points they had, they tended to participate more. They posted more. They contributed more content. However, the effects of the point system quickly wore off.

For IBM, gamification had a positive effect on some users – for a short amount of time. But using a point system didn’t sustain their employees’ interest in the long haul.

What Does This Mean for Employee Advocacy?

It’s easy to brush off the IBM study and say, “Well, that’s only one study, and it isn’t even about employee advocacy. How could this be relevant to me?”

Well, you see, gamification researchers have their doubts about the long-term benefits of point systems and leaderboards. Scott Nicholson of Syracuse University has written:

Ultimately, you have to ask yourself whether your goals for employee advocacy are short-term or long-term. If it is the former, then, try gamification. By using a point system or leaderboard, you’ll be able to interest some employees for a short period of time. Mission accomplished.

But if you want to build a long-term employee advocacy program, think twice before instituting a point system or a leaderboard. Chances are good that neither tactic will sustain your employees’ interest in the long run.

Looking for a long-term employee advocacy solution without gamification?

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