How Lenovo creates a holistic social media strategy with Sprinklr Advocacy
The Challenge
Lenovo is a global technology powerhouse founded in China in 1984 and listed in Hong Kong SAR, China. Lenovo’s vision is to bring “smarter technology for all,” and it has been a Sprinklr customer for more than eight years.
When Alli Soule joined Lenovo, she was tasked with taking over the company’s existing employee advocacy platform. At the time, the social media team was still defining its paid, earned, owned, and shared (PESO) strategy. A huge missing piece was visibility and understanding of employees’ brand-related activity on social media.
“One of the challenges we were looking to solve was how to quantify Lenovo’s employees’ contributions on social media,” Soule says. “Lenovo makes cool stuff, and we have great employees who complement the work our global social media teams are doing.”
Soule believes employee advocacy programs should encourage participants to develop their individual voices and social media strategies — first, as professionals in their fields of expertise and, second, as Lenovo brand advocates. She focuses on training and educating employees to be good social media citizens through Lenovo’s global social media and employee advocacy initiatives. She spends a lot of time myth-busting their assumptions about how the brand wants them to show up online.
“I can’t tell you how many times I hear, ‘I should be better on social media. I don’t post enough,’” Soule says. “I try to reassure employees that posting is one part of the social media equation — and that posting Lenovo content shouldn’t be their entire social media strategy either.” She credits advocacy platforms as critical enablement tools that help to mobilize employees around big company milestones and give social media newcomers a place to find “safe” content.
Prior to adopting Sprinklr Advocacy, Lenovo was using a different platform and considering a new solution. “Lenovo was already using several Sprinklr products,” Soule notes. “Through the process, we evaluated several tools, and Sprinklr rose to the top.”
Lenovo chose Sprinklr Advocacy to help them:
- Measure engagement, attribution, and reporting for global events and campaigns
- Equip business units with a tool to hand off major news, awards, partnerships, milestones, and product launches for amplification by interested employees
- Create reliable governance and oversight processes
- Provide a solution that is efficient and easy for Lenovo’s employees to use
- Integrate employee advocacy into their existing unified customer experience management (Unified-CXM) ecosystem
The Solution
At Lenovo, Sprinklr Advocacy is open to the entire organization, with about 50% of users in sales roles. The other half of the users sit in marketing communications, operations, project management, R&D, and engineering roles. Human Resources also uses Advocacy to post open job requisitions and for employer-branding initiatives. Soule asks employees to consider what makes them proud about working for Lenovo and encourages them to share content about corporate values, employee resource groups, sustainability, and other brand topics that resonate with their own interests.
Advocacy allows us to help employees create content that is interesting and important to them and their social networks. And, for the first time in memory, we’ve got a tool representative of all geographies, all corporate initiatives, and all efforts across the company to tell our One Lenovo story. It’s pretty cool.”
Social Education and Advocacy Manager, Lenovo
“Using Advocacy for employer branding is a natural fit,” Soule says. “The brand can say it’s a great place to work — loudly — on every platform. But it’s only made true when employees say it is.”
Training Lenovo employees on what makes good social content while elevating their social media profiles is an important part of employee advocacy. Soule also helps employees find value and purpose using social media at work, particularly those in sales roles. A report from the Hinge Research Institute found that, for sales professionals, employee advocacy can help attract and develop new business while also shortening the sales cycle. According to the report, 86% of employee advocates say that their involvement in social media has a positive effect on their careers.
The Outcome
By implementing Sprinklr Advocacy, Lenovo has exceeded its initial expectations for engagement results. “When we were using our old solution, it took us more than two years to reach 1,500 employee advocates,” says Soule. “In just one year of using Sprinklr, we have more than 2,000 users on the platform. We see this as a positive sign that there is an appetite for an employee advocacy platform.”
In a period of six-months, Lenovo realized positive business outcomes, including:
- a 200% increase in total engagements
- 2,350 total advocates
- 360% increase in social media reach
- 8K total shares (a 200% increase)
At the all-virtual CES 2022, where Lenovo typically has a significant physical presence, its employees shone online. When compared to Lenovo’s first major event utilizing Advocacy, employees outperformed themselves: while they shared 34 fewer posts, they increased their reach by 138% to 1.85 million and bolstered engagement by 217% to 7,650. At its annual all-employee kickoff, Advocacy power users from across the globe were recognized and gifted all-expenses-paid trips to see InterMilan, New York Yankees, and Milwaukee Bucks games. Winners had the highest average engagements per share when using Sprinklr Advocacy. The grand-prize winner out of Lenovo France had the highest average and also consistently used the suggested text to craft his own, original posts.
“We’re always preaching quality over quantity when we train folks on social media posting cadence,” Soule says. “Advocacy gives us the data to prove that.”
Lenovo’s emphasis on training and education has been pivotal to its employee advocacy program’s success. “Advocacy allows us to help employees create content that is interesting and important to them and their social networks,” Soule says. “And, for the first time in memory, we’ve got a tool representative of all geographies, all corporate initiatives, and all efforts across the company to tell our One Lenovo story. It’s pretty cool.”