AT&T Social Media Strategy: AT&T Social Circle employees as Social Advocates

AT&T social media strategy included utilizing the company’s employees who are already active on social networking sites like LinkedIn and Twitter and encourage them to share their opinions on the social media platforms and create awareness about the company’s products and services and also promote the marketing and other promotional campaigns. It all started in 2009 with a small group of employees and currently the group grew into strong 1500 employees who actively share updates and posts on Twitter and LinkedIn accounts. For eligibility into this program employees should be active on the above mentioned social networks for more than 90 days and they have to go through a training program to avoid any potential issues and problems. The company initially identified some 500 employees who were active in social networks and started a pilot project with them.

In a presentation at SocialMedia.org‘s BlogWell conference in Dallas, AT&T’s Senior Manager of Emerging Communications, Lee Diaz highlighted Nielsen survey facts that 92 % of consumers worldwide trust recommendations from friends and family more than any form of advertising and 77% of consumers are more likely to buy a product when they hear about it from someone they trust, which also encouraged AT&T to encourage their employees as social advocates. Employees are an excellent resource of knowledge and information about company’s products and services, actively participate on various social networking sites and with training, necessary tools and platforms and encouragement from company allowed employees to actively engage with consumers on social networking sites. AT&T also monitors and measures the activity and engagement of the employees so as to analyze the effectiveness of their content.

Lee Diaz also highlighted AT&T added a hub to centralize the content and the employee advocates. It allowed their advocates to explore all of the content in total and decide, for themselves, when and how they would share. The centralized hub allows AT&T to share content immediately, make announcements, etc. It was important that the employees can access the hub from any device. They used SocialChorus for the hub, which includes the embedded hashtag. One of the main components of AT&T’s social advocate program was a simple hashtag, #ATTemployee. This let their employees share content from AT&T while being transparent and staying legal. It is also important for AT&T employee advocates to engage with one another, too so as to further improve the content efficacy and AT&T has an internal platform called tSpace based on IBM Connections platform, which is available only to employee advocates. The program has seen some good results as there have been more than 20,000 influencer activities, more than 410,000 audience engagements, and estimated media value of more than US$ 1 million. AT&T is now encouraging all its 250,000 employees to participate in this program voluntarily and company is actively sharing the content that they want the employees to promote in all the internal platforms and it is up to the employees whether to share or reshare the AT&T news, information, announcements, etc. on their preferred social networking site. AT&T realizes the fact that employee engagement will have significant influence on the reputation & brand image of the company.