🤐 Your employees can’t answer that comment

Vahbiz Cooper has grown Demandbase’s employee advocacy program more than 200% by treating employees less like a distribution channel and more like creators, taking a page from her experience running influencer programs.

Meet the Master

Vahbiz Cooper 

People Programs Specialist, Demandbase

Lesson 1: Turn employee content into a game that’s worth playing. 

An employee advocacy program shouldn’t be pushy, Cooper tells me. “It is more about giving the employee freedom to [create content.]”

Ultimately, employees don’t want another task on their to-do lists. “We don’t want to give them the feeling of — this is something on my plate, I just need to tick these boxes off,” says Cooper. 

And to that end, it has to be fun. At Demandbase, Cooper uses tools like Bonusly and Oktopost to gamify the entire employee content process. Whatever tools you use, Cooper says, keep it simple: “It shouldn’t require more than two or three clicks, max.”

At Demandbase, for instance, sharing 10 posts earns the employee 50 Bonusly coins. “You need to have something that encourages people to get started.” 

Each month, Cooper’s team picks five internal brand ambassadors, ideally at least one from each department. The ambassadors write their own content or share pre-made posts, earning Bonusly coins as well as serving as Demandbase’s control group for employee-generated content.

Lesson 2: Script less. 

Nobody wants to see the same caption from three co-workers before noon on Monday, so Cooper uses Oktopost, which uses AI to vary captions and do region-based scheduling. But Cooper says there’s a bigger reason, too. 

The stakes are higher than just a repetitive feed. If the company controls the content, how can an employee answer a comment about it? 

Unanswered comments can do real damage to an employee advocacy program. “It would look so bad if there’s a comment that they have no idea how to respond to. And it gives the impression that [your] employees don’t reply back.”

“I get it [that] you want certain information to go out to your audience in a particular way — but the broader [content] should be more free-flowing” based on that employee’s understanding of what they’re promoting.

Lesson 3: Give every ambassador their own link (but not for the reason you might think). 

Give every ambassador their own link (but not for the reason you might think).

I assumed this was purely for attribution and reporting purposes, but that’s only part of it. 

“We want to get a better understanding of each employee’s audiences,” she tells me. If her company hosts an event in New York, an employee ambassador might generate a lot of clicks and impressions. Even if they’re no longer an ambassador, Cooper can reach out to them next time there’s a New York-based event they’re promoting.

And finally, be patient. Demandbase’s program has grown from 60 to 200 seats, and Cooper is candid about the challenges. “It’s slow, it's painful on some days, and you want to pull your hair out. You just have to show up and be consistent.”

“Even if you have two employees that are interested in this program — start it.”