Andrea Edwards writes more about Employee Generated Content in Part 2 of her article. If you want to catch up, read Part 1 here.

What About Employees Who Don’t Blog In The Company Voice?

Well they shouldn’t. They should blog in their own voice, and no one should be blogging about the company anyway. They should be blogging for their audience: helping them, being of service. Blogging and content marketing is not about you; it’s about delivering value to your audience. However, let’s say many of your employees are writing blogs about how great your business is – wouldn’t blogs like this be awesome for your recruitment efforts?

But let’s look at your business more broadly. When you look across your company, every type of discipline will be there. While you can segment deeply, let’s start with splitting employees into two categories.

First, your people in sales, product development, customer support, product design, leadership, etc. are all in a perfect position to blog to the challenges your customers are facing – in some form. This is incredibly valuable content that builds customer loyalty and is the essence of content marketing.

Then there is a second type of employee – your marketing and communications team, HR, finance, etc. This community can all comfortably blog on their broader discipline. As an example,you do not sell marketing solutions, so how do you include a blogger from your marketing team who is sharing their passion for their craft?That’s where a content hub comes in.My suggestion is to segment content from your employees across different themes, rather than just putting it all in one place. As an example, you could have three content pillars:

1. Thought leadership for your industry, focused on solving customer challenges.

2. HR – the “isn’t our company awesome” blogs series – to attract and retain talent. Don’t forget feature articles on your great employees here. Microsoft Stories does this beautifully.

3. A talent section, or Our Voice – to highlight the amazing people you have working for you, which is where the marketing blogger could feature.

What AreThe Goals Of All Of This?

• To build your business

• To influence customers throughout their decision-making process

• To gain a greater share of voice for your brand

• To build your SEO

• To attract great talent

• To keep great talent

• To make your employees stars

• To show what an awesome and innovative business you are

Will This Be Easy?

No. It’s like herding cats!With the established bloggers, they may push back because they’ve been doing really well without you, thank you very much. Equally, they may not trust you to honour their voice and integrity. You’ll have to work hard to win their trust.

It might also be slow getting things moving, so you need patience and you need resilience – often a lot of it. If you set your mind to success with your EGC program no matter what, you will get there and the ROI will start showing in year-end results.

Conclusion

To address the two challenges I raised at the beginning: building a personal brand is critical for every professional today, and blogging is core to that. Your people don’t have time? Then they don’t understand where the business is heading or where your customers are learning and deciding. Blunt but true.

Every professional in business must make building their personal brand a priority. When brands hire people who get this, it’s because they understand this is where real employee value lives today – in online influence and trust. These businesses will be more successful than those who continue to ignore the deep benefits of employee advocacy.

And controlling output? Any business that thinks the future of marketing is about controlling the voice of every employee is completely missing the opportunity. Your employees are the reason your customers do business with you. Trusting them to have the maturity to have a voice in the market is critical for attracting and retaining the best talent today. Equally, it is one of the most effective ways to build your business.

I can tell you one thing, once you get moving, you’ll wonder why you didn’t start your EGC program sooner.So, do you work for a company with an employee advocacy program? Are you welcome to blog for your company? Are you supported? I’d love to hear back from you to understand how this content relates to your reality.