As this blog has addressed many times before, there are many ways people demonstrate their advocacy for a company or brand. They talk or act on its behalf and actively spread word of mouth. They may wear their causes on their clothes and discuss them in social networks. They might carry branded products. They will pay a premium price for brands they support. In doing so, these advocates can have a significant impact on a business’ success (or failure if the business does something to damage its advocates’ trust).
Consumers aren’t the only ones with the ability to influence company success. Employees have increasing influence (see my first post on The Employee Advocate) and more opportunities to advocate for their employers. They often set up fan or group pages on Facebook for example. Of growing importance is their ability to “vote” their companies onto acclaimed “best employers” lists. These lists, awards and rankings not only help to recruit more great talent but signify to the world that the company values employees and in turn the valued and proud employees work harder for their customers. A client once told us that her company’s salesforce uses these honors as a sales tool because their customers want to do business with a company that treats its employees well. Happy employees, happy customers.
As close observers of these rankings (Weber Shandwick’s SCOREBOXX™ database includes approximately 900 awards of all kinds, roughly 100 of which recognize companies for its employee satisfaction and/or training and development), we’re seeing the popularity of these rankings growing. Most glaring has been an increase, particularly in the past year, in the number of our clients who want to understand how their strengths can be recognized by their industry, talent prospects and other stakeholders through unbiased third party recognition. Aside from that anecdote, here are just a few facts…
A Google search of “best companies to work for” generates 661,000 results for the 2009 time period, compared with 190,000 in 2007 and 309,000 in 2008. That’s a stunning 248% increase of the topic’s online visibility.
50% of chief communications officers at North American Fortune 500 companies told us in our annual The Rising CCO study that awards and recognition are an important way their company leadership measures communications effectiveness.
CNBC dedicated a five-minute segment to this week’s release of the the Fortune Best Companies to Work For list. Perhaps one of the most well known of the best employer rankings, this list uses a rigorous method to identify the best place to work in the U.S. with employee ratings accounting for most of the score.
Glassdoor.com’s annual Employees’ Choice Awards of the 50 Best Places to Work included reviews of 11,000 companies among nearly 75,000 employees in 2008 and 37,000 companies among nearly 100,000 employees in 2009.
Based on facts like those above, and by the growing demand from clients to better understand and leverage these lists, we think that ‘best employer’ awards will take on more significance for promoting and rewarding good corporate cultures. Companies with less than stellar environments may be pressured to listen much more closely to employee opinions.
Yesterday The New York Times teased an upcoming Strategic Management Journal paper about the positive influence of zealous employees. Their research found that strong sales growth is correlated with an organizational culture in which employees thought more highly of their company than did the public. In other words, when staff believes in its organization, pride and loyalty shows through and customers pick up on the positivity.
The theme of employee advocacy, and its importance to business success, was one of our key findings from research we released earlier this year (Risky Business: Reputations Online™ conducted with the Economist Intelligence Unit). Our study found that global executives believe that the best way to protect reputations online is to monitor employee satisfaction levels and respond to results from employee satisfaction surveys. Many executives echoed the importance of building “best places to work” cultures when asked in an open-ended question about the greatest reputation threats facing their companies over the next three years. As one Australian executive said in response to this question: “Failure to engage the passions of employees will cause the most damage to corporate reputation in the future.” Without a doubt, no company interested in protecting its reputation can afford to have a mob of grumbling employees online. Satisfied employees who are company advocates are the best antidote for–and defense against–reputation failure. A company’s culture is ultimately its best protection both online and offline.
Looking forward to the release of the Strategic Management Journal report. In the meantime, remember: your employees are your best advocates.
New level of iPhone fandom and Halloween genius, or a bigger cultural statement about where media personalization is headed? Whatever the case, I hope they got a ton of candy for the effort in addition to their well-deserved accolades on YouTube.
In today’s Sunday The New York Times, the U2 singer Bono writes an opinion piece on Rebranding America. For those still scratching their heads about President Obama’s recent honor as a recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, this article provides insight into America’s renewed reputation in the world and President’s Obama’s role in that shift. As a non-American, Bono explains:
“But I will venture to say that in the farthest corners of the globe, the president’s words are more than a pop song people want to hear on the radio. They are lifelines.
In dangerous, clangorous times, the idea of America rings like a bell (see King, M. L., Jr., and Dylan, Bob). It hits a high note and sustains it without wearing on your nerves. (If only we all could.) This was the melody line of the Marshall Plan and it’s resonating again. Why? Because the world sees that America might just hold the keys to solving the three greatest threats we face on this planet: extreme poverty, extreme ideology and extreme climate change. The world senses that America, with renewed global support, might be better placed to defeat this axis of extremism with a new model of foreign policy.”
What was revealing to me was how Bono is described in the footer where the author’s bio and background are set forth in what seems like less than 140 characters. It says: “Bono, the lead singer of the band U2 and a co-founder of the advocacy group ONE and (Product)RED, is a contributing columnist for The Times.” This being a blog all about advocacy, Bono’s ONE organization is breezily identified as an advocacy group. Today it seems fairly common to describe groups organized around causes or issues as advocacy groups whereas years ago they might have been described as non-profits or NGOs…non-governmental groups. Worth noting how times have changed along with our descriptors.
Wanted to direct you to a great article written by Weber Shandwick’s own Colin Byrne, CEO UK and Europe. It appeared last week and includes practical tips for minimizing reputation damage that comes from a company’s badvocates. Colin also cites real-world examples of the kinds of damage companies have experienced when they haven’t kept “the window to sabotage” shut tightly. Enjoy the article.
I found myself landing on a new site called Justmeans. It has an interesting premise which isthat companies can subscribe and communicate with those interested in their good work. Companies who join use Justmeans’ distribution service to syndicate their work to various social networks. They have an impressive array of clients such as HP, Seventh Generation, Timberland, Financial Times, Best Buy, Intel, Accion, Campbell Soup (disclosure: some are clients although I learned about this site through my son who is involved with Starting Bloc). I was able to find out about what different companies are doing in the responsibility space all on one site. Since I am always interested in new conferences, I learned that Justmeans and the FT are organizing summits and have two coming up in NY this fall. For companies looking to reach advocates, it is an interesting way to communicate with those that matter. Check it out. I am going to follow some companies’ twitters through justmeans and see how it goes.
If this sounds familiar, well, it should. “The future ain’t what it used to be” is one of the all-time great malapropisms of the all-time baseball great Yogi Berra. Marketers should heed these words today, now more than ever, in light of the sustained global recession.
After all, Yogi knew something about challenging times: he not only was a member of 13 World Series championship teams between 1948-1962; he was part of the generation here in the US that grew up in the Great Depression. So today’s recession may just be “deja vu all over again” for this Yankee hall-of-famer. Just keep in mind that he also said things like “you should always go to other people’s funerals, otherwise, they won’t come to yours,” “when you come to a fork in the road, take it,” and “baseball is ninety percent mental; the other half is physical.” OK, Sun Tzu it’s not. But ignore him at your own risk.
Why? Because research continues to suggest the recession is having a deep impact on consumer behavior, creating what look to be long-term changes that affect everything from brand loyalty to the way marketers reach their audiences. This recent report from Initiative (our sister agency), based on a May survey of 3,200 consumers in the U.S., western Europe and China, provides more evidence why.
Of note, the study found a significant drop in trust in established marketing channels and a conversely sharp rise in people’s trust of individuals, including those who comment about brands online. For example, 43 percent reported far greater trust in online consumer content such as blogs, review sites and forums, while 48 percent said they trusted “expert opinion.” They also found that 76 percent of consumers said they trusted the opinions of those closest to them, the word of mouth of family and friends. Like the blog title says: it’s all about advocacy, now more than ever.
I like how Sue Moseley, who lead the study for Initiative, put it: That established brands can no longer rely on being accepted on faith because they’ve been around for a long time. Instead, they need to step up to the times to provide consumers with something authentic, tangible, transparent, real… and the means to evaluate it from independent sources online. The implication: the need for a new marketing model and approach to communications, on that puts igniting advocacy at the heart.
Yes, the future is certainly not what it used to be for marketing anymore. Come to think of it, it isn’t for baseball or music or the media business and I could go on. Maybe it’s just like the wise catcher said: “a nickel ain’t worth a dime anymore.” But being an optimist by nature, I’d like to think this other cautionary Yogism is the one that applies for our field: “if you don’t know where you are going, you might wind up someplace else.” True, so very very true. Thanks, Yogi.
OK, full disclosure. I probably have seen Zack Snyder’s “300″ approaching 300 times now (including last night when somehow I got my wife to watch). So I’m likely to jump at the chance to use a pic like this in a post no matter how threadbare the tie to advocacy.
But the Gods must have been smiling upon me this morning when I saw this just published article in the Journal of Marketing called “Are Women More Loyal Customers Than Men? Gender Differences in Loyalty to Firms and Individual Service Providers.” Now while that clearly sounds like it has a lot to do with advocacy, it doesn’t exactly scream “Thermopylae,” the ancient battle site where the Greeks, 300 Spartans and their allies, held off masses of invading Persians in 480 BC. Or does it?
What our present authors have seemed to confirm here is something I’m told is called the “male warrior hypothesis,” which states that men are actually more loyal to groups, an orientation shaped by evolution to increase a tribe’s chances of survival. Well, if the suicidal battle of King Leonidas and 300 Spartans against some 800,000 invaders of Xerxes’ armies isn’t the most epic case of ultimate group loyalty I don’t know what is. Especially when it looks so amazingly cool and vibrant thanks to the magic of CG technology. I don’t know about you, but I know lots of guys who would be OK with this kind of loyalty “hypothesis.”
So what about the other half, all those Xenas out there? Are women not the equivalent of a Lucy Lawless warrior princess when it comes to their customer loyalty? Apparently not, according to the authors, because women’s loyalty tends to take a more personal and less tribal form. More specifically, they found that women are more loyal to individuals as opposed to the collective. This is something of a reversal, as the conventional wisdom has held that women are more loyal customers in general than men. And, therefore, better advocates in turn perhaps.
So who do marketers want on their side? A customer phalanx of men or women? Who is more likely to “die for” their favorite brand or company? The answer not surprisingly is that it all depends. It also may matter whether you consider brand loyalty to be more akin to sticking by an entire group vs. by the side of an individual. On this question the authors are silent (for now). But one thing is for sure. The research is yet another example of how if you simply assume the conventional wisdom about loyalty is right you can get it heroically wrong. Herodotus and Hollywood notwithstanding.
Thought I’d share another finding about advocacy from our study with the Economist Intelligence Unit - Risky Business: Reputations Online. This research snippet is about where Badvocacy meets Web 2.0.
Although global executives identify major media as the most threatening to company reputation (84%), plenty of executives (42%) recognize the damage new media can impose. Blogs and discussion forums are the most feared with online videos, comments on social networking sites, Wikipedia entries, and online pictures compounding potential destruction. Considering that fast-rising Web 2.0 new media and social networking tools can literally rally advocates and badvocates overnight, more executives should be concerned about new media as a reputation killer. Here’s how each of these rank in terms of global executive fear:
While the blog is considered the king of Web 2.0 badvocacy risk now, it will be interesting to see how the other technologies evolve as badvocacy threats.
If you’ve been following this blog you know that we at Weber Shandwick firmly believe in the “return on advocacy.” Simply, it’s the business benefits of finding and connecting with your advocates. Now maybe it’s time to kick off the “return on BADVOCACY.” Can there be such a thing? Afterall, our own study, Risky Business: Reputations Online™ clearly identified the fear instilled in global executives by customer and employee badvocates.
Employee badvocates are a big concern: executives ranked employee criticism (41%) in a tie for first place with leaked confidential information as the greatest online risk to their own company’s reputation. As employees wrestle with declining pensions and possible layoffs, reputation bandits will be even harder at work online.
The Internet provides innumerable platforms for employees to strike, usually anonymously, at a company’s reputation. However, rather than being immobilized with fear about the potential for such strikes, Nokia, as noted in an article in this week’s BusinessWeek, is embracing employee badvocacy. They are allowing their employees to rant anonymously on an intranet soapbox called BlogHub. “Workers can be savage as they flame thier employer…Nokia managers want them to fire away.” Nokia believes that innovation is accelerated by encouraging employees to say what is on their minds. I would surmise that the other benefit is that by allowing employees to release their frustrations in a “safe” environment, they won’t be tempted to go outside Nokia’s four walls and vent.
It will be interesting to see if Nokia sees a Return on Badvocacy as it struggles in a tough economy with strong competitors. In the meantime, we’ll keep on eye out for other examples of turning badvocacy into a positive return.
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All About Advocacy is a blog written by and for people who believe in the accelerating power of Advocates in society today.
Contributors include a wide range of Weber Shandwick Advocates (plus any other Advocacy fans like yourself) who share their unique perspectives about this new shift in communications.
We encourage comments from our readers! That’s what advocacy is all about!
For further information about this blog go to the About page. For author biogs please go to the Contributing Advocates page.
Disclaimer
Everything posted in this blog represents personal opinion of the individual authors. It does not necessarily represent the views of Weber Shandwick or its clients.
As this blog has addressed many times before, there are many ways people demonstrate their advocacy for a company or brand. They talk or act on its behalf and actively spread word of mouth. They may wear their causes on their clothes and discuss them in social networks. They might carry branded products. They will pay a premium price for brands they support. In doing so, these advocates can have a significant impact on a business’ success (or failure if the business does something to damage its advocates’ trust).
In today’s Sunday 
