This episode is part one of three co-hosted by Glenn Gaudet, Founder & President of GaggleAMP. Glenn and I spoke with Sandy Adam, Global Social Media Marketing Manager at ANSYS, Inc. about their strategy to showcase the expertise of their employees. ANSYS is one of the three companies featured in Social Business Journal, Volume 9: What’s Working in Employee Advocacy.
ANSYS is an engineering simulation software company. Many of the products we use today are designed using ANSYS software. As Global Social Media Marketing Manager, Sandy manages their 14 social media channels handling strategy, content creation, and training marketing and sales teams on best practices.
The employee advocacy program at ANSYS was started in 2012 to provide their staff with shareable content and to show them what kind of content is appropriate for each social channel. Sandy focused on educating their employees on when and if they should highlight ANSYS so they avoided coming across spammy to their followers.
When Sandy first started at ANSYS, she created a three-to-five-year social media marketing roadmap that laid out how social would expand across functions other than marketing. She made it clear how social media and employee advocacy in particular would generate brand awareness. The selling point for funding was the additional exposure the business would receive. The program was initially offered to 300 salespeople at ANSYS’ annual sales kickoff event. It was left up to employees if they wanted to get involved or not. Sandy continues to attend the annual SKO event and shares success stories to interest new users to join the program.
At first many still had the impression that social media was just for personal use. Today many employees have adopted a social mindset and curate their own content, while others just share what’s provided to them by Sandy via GaggleAMP. To support the program, Sandy offers monthly open office hours for questions. She also created an internal Google Plus community to share wins and statistics for motivation. She often asks for feedback about the content provided and how the program could be improved.
“Keeping the two-way communication going is very important to adoption.”@sandyadam #sbeshow
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The ANSYS employee advocacy program is great for employee retention and thought leadership. They recently started using it for recruiting too. The program allows subject matter experts the opportunity to be recognized, and as an engineering company, their employees have a lot of expertise that can attract prospects.
Sandy explains that salespeople are a challenge because they’re so busy prospecting and making sales calls that they don’t move along the adoption path. It’s nice for them to have, and they will share content provided to them within GaggleAMP. However, follow-up is a bit of a challenge. There’s always a need for more training, specifically on understanding how to engage.
Listen to the podcast above or on your phone’s podcast player to hear more from Sandy about how their employee advocacy program is progressing. Download your copy of Social Business Journal, Volume 9 to read about ANSYS and two other brands about what’s working for them in employee advocacy.
Featured On This Episode:
- Sandy Adam on LinkedIn and Twitter
- ANSYS’ website
- Glenn Gaudet on LinkedIn and Twitter
- GaggleAMP’s website
- GaggleAMP’s AMPlify event
- Download Social Business Journal, Vol. 9: What’s Working in Employee Advocacy
- Join our Social Business Engine community
- Write a review of this podcast in iTunes
- Social Business Engine on Twitter: @sbengine
- Vengreso’s YouTube Channel | YouTube channel
There are TWO WAYS you can listen to this podcast with Sandy Adam.
You can click the Listen Now button at the top of this page… Or, you can listen from your mobile device’s podcast player through iTunes or Stitcher.
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P.S. Our next podcast episode features Christa Gorham, Group Manager, Large Business Marketing & Communications at CenturyLink!
