How Microsoft Transforms Employees into Brand Advocates on a Global Scale

Global Employee Advocacy : The Pilot

Launching employee advocacy on a global scale, while at the same time addressing regional needs, is no easy task. After evaluating several tools, Microsoft selected Sociabble to scale its employee advocacy program worldwide.

By launching a pilot phase in selected countries, the company was able to establish the key objectives and structure for its program, which was later rolled out throughout the organization, engaging around 17 000 employees.

We estimate that if 10 000 Microsoft employees use Sociabble, it will generate between 350 and 500 million potential impressions per year, with an estimated equivalent advertising value of between 5 and 10 million dollars.

Sébastien Imbert Director of Digital Marketing

By leveraging employee advocacy, Microsoft wanted to provide easy access to relevant content for social sellers, target receptive audiences and amplify the reach of social media content. Beginning with a pilot phase in selected countries, the company launched the Sociabble employee advocacy platform, aggregating content from official company social media streams, curated RSS feeds and the accounts of Microsoft executives. Highly visual and incredibly easy to use, the Sociabble interface allows members to view all content and share posts on any of their own social networks.

The objective of this pilot phase was to determine how to launch a global employee advocacy program while considering both global and regional needs. As well as benefiting from the localization of the Sociabble platform in five languages (English, French, German, Spanish and Portuguese), this objective was achieved thanks to the creation of a specific channel structure.

Dynamic channels: The organization of global and localized content

Launching Sociabble in around 40 countries, Microsoft used the platform’s dynamic channel functionality to tag content and filter it onto channels, including Marketing, Finance, Manufacturing, Retail and Local Events.

The Microsoft Sociabble network has 20 standardized channels, each of which contains both global and localized content. This means that when employees sign up, they receive content that is tailored to them according to their location, but are also able to access all global Microsoft content.

The channel structure implemented by Microsoft is crucial for a number of reasons. Firstly, it gives Microsoft employees throughout the organization easy access to the content that is most relevant to them. Secondly, it gives the company a high amount of visibility concerning the engagement rates of global and localized content, as well as the activity of different user groups. And thirdly, it allows administrators to devise and launch campaigns that are tailored to their region.

For Microsoft, being able to localize content for employee advocates throughout the organization was a key priority. Beginning with a pilot in selected countries was therefore key to the success of the employee advocacy program, as it allowed the company to structure content channels according to a defined global approach and identified regional needs.