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Brand engagement and employee advocacy shouldn’t be limited to one area.  If you have customers around the world, your advocacy frequency signal should reach them.  Julie Hayes, Sr. Brand Communications Manager at Autodesk shares how they scaled their program to reach advocates in 37 countries and 11 languages.  Her hard-earned lessons could be the key to unlocking going global with your employee advocacy efforts.

Takeaways:

Before going global consider these 3 things:

• First ask yourself: is going global right for you and your company?
  • Examine your business landscape.  Where are you employees located? Where is the revenue coming from etc.?
  • If you have a significant pool of both people and money based globally then you might consider expanding your employee advocacy program to a global level.

• Before going global consider these 3 things:
  • First, know your markets and then examine if your people in those markets are using social media.  Is it normal for people in that area to talk about work on social because it isn’t always the norm?  Once you have that figured out then you can move forward with testing and learning what works best in what market because you can’t take the easy road and use the same content, same practices for every market.  You will have to tail the experience.
  • Second area to think about is your publishing model.  What is going to work for you to get the right content, in the right language to the right group.  Julie used a hub and spoke model for their content but that might not be the right choice for you.  Find what works for you and where your people are to make sure it the most effective.
  • The final area that you need explore before going global is thinking about the content that you are actually going to publish.  Source your content locally.   Plain and simple.  This is where your efforts will find success.

Watch the video of Julie’s session.

Connect with Julie on Twitter @hartsein_jbh or on LinkedIn

About Shel Holtz

Shel Holtz, ABC (Accredited Business Communicator), is director of Internal Communications at Webcor, a commercial general contractor headquartered in San Francisco. Before joining Webcor, Shel spent 21 years as principal of Holtz Communication + Technology. In addition to integrating technology into communications strategies, his expertise includes strategic communications planning, change management, organizational culture, business initiatives and communications research. Full bio