Our client realized that organic reach through owned channels is decreasing rapidly, this is something that needed to be tackled. It was also understood that employee advocates are twice as trustworthy as a CEO. This case study covers the process involved in increasing social activity via employee advocacy by 140% through the use of gamification and the Brandwatch social intelligence platform.

1. Case Study/
Leading Fortune
500 tech company
Empowering employee
advocacy with social
listening

2. Fallstudie/ Client
At a glance/
Background Key Results
Our client is the worldwide leader in helping companies
seize the opportunities of tomorrow by delivering
the amazing results that come from connecting the
previously unconnected. Our client is empowering
countries, cities, industries and businesses around
the globe to move faster in order to keep pace with
digital transformation and the move to the Internet of
Everything (IoE). With approximately 70,000 partners,
our client is very well positioned to provide our
customers with next generation networking, security,
data center, and collaboration products and solutions
that help them achieve their desired business outcomes
• Saw employee engagement increase
by 55%
• Encouraged engagement from 232
employees, across 25 teams.
• Their central social media hub
combined with empolyee engagement
generates a reach of approximately
150,000 people.
Increased social
activity by

3. The Goal
Word of mouth marketing has never been more powerful, with 61% of customers admitting they read online reviews before
making a purchase decision, reviews and opinions shared on social media and via dedicated review websites impact and play a
big part in the decision making of our everyday lives.
So who better to review and promote your organization than your own employees? Using one of your biggest assets - your loyal and
trusted employees - can help shape your organization’s online reputation.
Google Trends shows a peak in searches for employee advocacy - search volume for employee advocacy has soared in 2015, more than
double when compared with 2014 search data. Particularly relevant to B2B organizations, it is a topic often adopted by brands which
perhaps don’t typically have the most vocal customers online when compared with more consumer facing businesses.
Our B2B client has a rich history of connecting things, from people and businesses to countries and industries. So, it is perhaps
unsurprising that the organization made the connection that by empowering their employees to be proactive and by encouraging their
staff to share the organization’s content on their own social media channels that they could create advocates within their own business.
The Challenge
A modern challenge that brands and organizations face is that organic reach on their own channels is decreasingly rapidly. For
a business, reaching your own fans and followers is getting more onerous, especially since the enforcement of some social
networks to charge businesses to reach the extent of their own audience.
In the long list of priorities for a large organization, seeding content at the optimum time is certainly one that is referred to often.
Traditionally the organizational structure for distributing social media content sat firmly within the social teams who own the overall brand
voice and own social channels. However, in order to increase the reach and impact your content can have, taking a more holistic view of
social media is vital.
Research by MSLGroup shows that a brand’s messaging reached 561% further when shared by employees, versus the same messages
shared via official brand social channels.
By decentralising social media operations within your organization and encouraging advocates from other departments across the
enterprise to help share your content, you’re automatically amplifying the message.
According to Gartner, the number of companies blocking social media access for employees is dropping 10% per year. Half blocked
access in 2010, dropping to less than 30% in 2014.
The challenge our client faced was that within such a large organization, how do you empower your staff to share your content - how do
you encourage them?
The Solution
Social intelligence from Brandwatch Analytics provided them with the ability to listen to what their employees were saying on
their own social channels. However, the team wanted to gain deeper insights on the online activity of its workforce.
Dashboards within Brandwatch Analytics provided the freedom and capability to dissect the metrics most important to them - metrics
such as which employee was the most influential online, which topics they were discussing and what content they were sharing.
Data like this gave them a better understanding of employee behavior, but this was only the beginning. To drive employee advocacy
further, our client created social league tables and began rewarding the staff members who reached the top of the leaderboards with
prizes, helping to drive healthy competition within the organization.

4. Social Listening and
Gamification
Potential Reach
This tech giant operates with a
central social media hub. Its social
media managers are responsible for
all activity on the brand’s corporate
channels. This includes content
creation, community management
and keeping channels up to date with
the latest content. This team alone
posts around 300 tweets per month,
reaching around 50,000 followers.
When our client looked at its wider EMEA
marketing teams, not just the social media
managers, they saw that combined this
team posted around 1,500 tweets per
month, with a reach of around 150,000
people. The scalability and the possibilities
immediately stood out to them. If all EMEA
employees could be encouraged to share
their content the potential reach was 15
million.
SOCIAL MEDIA MANAGERS
MARKETING
TEAM
ALL
EMPLOYEES
Research by Edelman in 2014 found that employee advocates
are twice as trustworthy as a CEO and according to Social Media
Today, content shared by employees receives eight times more
engagement than content shared by brand channels. Your
employees really can be your most powerful social asset.
15,000,000
users reached
150,000
tweets
150,000
users reached
1,500
tweets
50,000
users reached
300
tweets

5. All employees within were invited to take
part in the social league tables. Those who
accepted shared their Twitter handles and
were setup with a login to Brandwatch
Analytics.
Global
benchmarking
The flexible and interactive Dashboards
within Brandwatch Analytics allowed
Our client to track all employees in
one place and provided a central hub
for employees to log in and view their
progress.
The league tables within Brandwatch could
be filtered by department or team and then
by region or country. Employees started
benchmarking their performance against
their peers, encouraging a competitive
element to the initiative.
Desire to learn
The gamification element of the social
league tables soon took off. Employees
became so engaged with the programme
they started requesting social media
training and reached out to their peers at
the top of the league tables asking for tips
and advice on how to improve their own
presence and reach on social media
Rewards
To help motivate their employees further
our client introduced a badging system
which recognised those who hit the top
spot of the league tables. Our client also
ran a reward scheme which publicly named
the leaders in internal communications,
helping to drive the gamification element
even further.
Results
Over 232 employees across 25 teams
engaged with the social league tables
and social activity increased by 140%.
This campaign has created a team of
passionate, engaged employee advocates
who have a desire to share content. Its
staff are also more engaged with social
media and requests for training resulted in
running social media bootcamps for their
employees to help educate their staff on
how to optimize their social media activity.
“The impact score
within Brandwatch
was the most
important metric.
It provided us with
exactly what we
needed to create
the social league
tables.”
“Brandwatch Analytics subscriptions include unlimited users, so we were able to provide all
employees with a Brandwatch login at no extra cost.”
Senior Digital Strategist

6. About/
Brandwatch.com | @brandwatch | Brandwatch Blog | Press Office
“The Brandwatch set
up was great as it
didn’t involve too much
customization. The
insights we needed were
set-up automatically for
us within the dashboards.”
Senior Digital Strategist
Brandwatch
Brandwatch is the world’s leading social
intelligence company. Its social media
listening and analytics technology
platform gathers millions of online
conversations every day and provides
users with the tools to analyze them,
empowering brands and agencies to
make smarter, data-driven business
decisions.
Acquiring social influencer analytics
firm PeerIndex in December 2014,
Brandwatch continues on its aggressive
business trajectory following on its most
recent round of venture funding to the
tune of $22 million. The Brandwatch
platform, ranked highest in customer
satisfaction by G2Crowd in the Spring
2015 social media monitoring report, is
used by over 1000 brands and agencies,
including Cisco, Whole Foods, Whirlpool,
British Airways,
Sony Music, and Dell.
Brandwatch. Now You Know.
www.brandwatch.com