#102: How to Build an Employee Creator Program ft. Heike Young

Rhona Pierce (00:00.108)
The most credible person at your company is not your CEO. It's someone three levels down who actually does the work. Heike Young spent 15 years at Microsoft and Salesforce learning how to find those people and turn them into trusted voices. Today, we're digging into how to spot your best internal creators, give them the support to thrive, and build a program that delivers real business impact.

Heike Young (00:21.646)
The problem is you can't copy and paste your way to thought leadership, unfortunately. Moving away from that into a world where maybe we pick 10 or 15 creators and we really invest in them.

Rhona Pierce (00:34.786)
What actually drives your engineer or your product manager or your salesperson or product person to want to build a presence online?

Heike Young (00:45.376)
are going to need some motivations, some incentives to do that. I don't think leaders realize how much it hypes up their teams if they simply go on LinkedIn and like their employees' posts and say, great job.

Rhona Pierce (00:58.84)
From your experience, why do you think both of those approaches fail to move the needle?

Heike Young (01:04.181)
You're gonna have to figure out the right formula for success for your brand.

Rhona Pierce (01:09.934)
Heike welcome to Workfluencer.

Heike Young (01:12.642)
Thank you. It's so amazing to be here and just talk to somebody else who's so focused on amplifying employee voices instead of getting people to just, you know, shut up and do their jobs. I think that's you know what you're about and what you celebrate. So great to chat with you.

Rhona Pierce (01:27.027)
Yes. So for folks who haven't met you yet, what's the Heika Young story in thirty seconds?

Heike Young (01:33.538)
my gosh. 30 seconds. Wow. I thought I was gonna come on here to chat EGC and not do math. I'm scared now. I think I stopped paying attention to math class in like seventh grade. so yeah, so very quickly, like you said, I spent a lot of time in very large enterprise tech companies like Salesforce and Microsoft leading content and social media. And along the way, I think what I learned is that brands don't land, people do.

And when it comes to brand marketing today, when it comes to employer marketing, all of those things, really the best and even most time efficient and cost efficient way to do all of those things is by amplifying the voices of the real employees at your company. And there's a lot of talk about creator marketing and you know, influencers. It's like exactly like you said at the beginning of the episode, some of the best people that could speak on behalf of your brand are already employed there.

And spoiler alert, you do need to reward them, but you probably don't need to give them tens of thousands of dollars per post either. And so there's really a yin and a yang here where these two things are complementary and this benefits both the both the employees and the the employer.

Rhona Pierce (02:41.352)
Yes. so when most companies launch an employee generated content program, employee advocacy or whatever you want to call it, they usually like default to copy and paste corporate approved content or like day-in-the-life videos when they're wow out there. And those don't really always drive business results. From your experience, why do you think both of those approaches fail to move the needle?

Heike Young (03:10.348)
A lot of times, and so you know, I could have mentioned this a second ago, but I forgot I was worried about the 30 seconds. but I I left Microsoft last year to run my own consulting business. I do a lot of B2B content and social media marketing consulting now. I also do workshops, you know, I'm a speaker. And one of the biggest things that I've been working on since leaving corporate and starting my own thing has been these EGC programs and how they ladder up to bigger content and social media strategies.

And so, what I have really learned through this process is that there's a lot of legacy technology that brands have stood up inside of their social media teams, which is like these kind of standard employee advocacy tools. And it's basically give everybody access to a bunch of links and copy and paste posts, and then we'll check the box of employee advocacy. The problem is you can't copy and paste your way to thought leadership, unfortunately. I wish you could. You really can't. So

What I am suggesting is that we do kind of a reframe of this idea of employee advocacy and really focus it on employer creators who are really invested in being there. And I think this looks like in practice, kind of moving away from giving maybe you have 500 people at your company, maybe you think 200 of them will copy and paste from your tool. Moving away from that into a world where maybe we pick 10 or 15 creators.

And we really invest in them. We train them on how to do things like create their own videos, make infographics, design frameworks, posting all of these things from their individual personal pro profiles. And then we repost these things from the brand page. And so they're still fueling our overall content engine and it's all tied together. and so what I have seen really work is not giving people strict rules about how many times they have to post, you know, strict words that they have to say, but instead

We give them themes, we give them pillars to ladder up to. I don't really care what word you use, themes, pillars, you know, it's it doesn't matter to me. We give them topics that this company can uniquely own in the market and that this company can really contribute to. And we find the right voices around those content clusters, around those themes or topics. And that is what I put into practice at Microsoft. You know, I really trained a lot of executives on making their first social media videos for the first time and you know, uploading that to social, which can be really a vulnerable moment.

Heike Young (05:36.822)
A lot of times, and you might be listening to this feeling the same. A lot of times I think, you know, there's we feel very confident in situations like a meeting or a customer keynote where we can script and plan and have it all laid out in advance. And we could go up on stage and be like, Yeah, I could do the demo for a hundred people. Like that's no problem. I know the product demo inside and out. But when it comes to whipping out the phone in our pocket and just like propping it up and filming a little 30-second video about a a cool work-related insight we had that day.

That can be really intimidating. And I know I've been there too. and now I'm at a place where I made over 300 videos for social media last year. You know, last year I had about 78 million impressions on my LinkedIn content personally, and most of that was through my videos. And so I really want to help people kind of find their voice and their ability to do this that also benefits the the company overall. But it it really does need to ladder up to a strategy. We don't just wanna do what I call like a spaghetti cannon, which is just like throwing a bunch of spaghetti at the wall, see what sticks.

Rhona Pierce (06:34.734)
Yeah. Hey, have you subscribed? Let's fix that. It's the easiest way to support this show. I love that the term of spaghetti canon, because it's true. It's a lot of what happens. And I I think it's probably driven by a little bit of what you were saying.

You everyone's like, okay, we have 500 employees, they do some weird math, and we need this amount to be posting. We I've sat in those meetings, I'm sure you have too, where it's like, wait, what? And I a hundred percent agree with your approach. Maybe it's 10 employees. how do we like figure out what employees to start building with? Like, how do you internally source those employees?

Heike Young (07:21.398)
This is such a big blocker that I think a lot of companies never get past. And it keeps them from realizing their impact through EGC, through employee creators, because they get very tripped up at just like, well, who's it gonna be? And it can become political. Is it just the executives in this region? Is it just the people with this job title? You know, who has permission to post sort of a thing? And so the only way out is through. If you're gonna invest in this type of program.

I would really rather have 10 or 20 people that are truly committed to this effort long term than 200 people that just want to copy and paste. But we need to be very intentional about who those 10 or 20 people are. Maybe there's more if you work at a really large company at a Microsoft, for instance. But you need to be very intentional about who these people are. And so the very first thing that I would start with, and that I start with, you know, with clients as I'm building out these kind of programs with them is simply, what are we gonna say?

We can't pick people. We can't start moving ahead to what videos and what series and you know exactly who's gonna do. We can't do any of that stuff before we decide what's the message that we're uniquely gonna own in the market. What's the IP? You know, what is the content strategy overall? How does this ladder up to our brand objectives? How does this support all of our KPIs for the year? I would really start there. I would highly recommend starting there rather than jumping to let's get everybody posting. Cause then

Again, you're gonna have well, you're gonna have a spaghetti can and it's gonna be a lot of noise and not a lot less impact from your strategy, right? So I would I would kinda start there, the overarching plan of what are we gonna say? What are the goals? How does this ladder up to other strategies? Because EGC is so new.

And something that I find because these programs are pretty new, especially in B2B, you know, we don't have like the Starbucks and gaps of the world. They're so advanced, they're empowering thousands of employees to post TikToks and a lot of B2B companies are doing this for the first time. And so I think with these programs, they're relatively new. And I think folks just don't yet realize like exactly what this is gonna ladder up to. Is it HR? Is it marketing? Is it comms?

Heike Young (09:29.472)
It's a little bit of all of those things, which means it's highly cross-functional, which does mean that it can get a little bit political. But I think that like any good cross-functional effort, the more people you're bringing along, the more powerful you're gonna be, maybe. And so the whole goal is to unite all of these people around a big idea. So I think it's worth getting through the muck around this.

And then from there, really identifying, okay, well, if these are the three topics that we want to own, if these are the things we want to talk about in the market this year that we really will ladder, we believe will ladder up to larger campaign and marketing and HR, et cetera goals, who are going to be the people to tell that story? And I think it is a mix across three different areas. I think it's a mix between seniority levels. So you want people at the very tippy tippy top.

You also probably want people a few levels down. Some people have a little more free time on their hands, to be honest. It's really hard to get an executive to commit to a very rigid, intense LinkedIn posting strategy, for example. I would also look at a mix of a mix of role types. So you want people that are peers of your ICP. Maybe if you're you have a software tool that sells to marketers, you want marketing leaders, marketing practitioners. But it's also possible that you want.

Folks in your customer service organization to post. They have direct relationships with customers. They meet with customers every week and they're the tip of the spear when it comes to being able to speak to customer pain points and things that they're seeing in real life. So you probably want a mix of role types, seniority levels. And the last one I would say is probably regions, especially for these big global enterprises, larger global mid-market companies. You want to be able to use people that speak to the local regions in their own language, using their other their original examples from that.

Local market. When I worked at Exact Target, it was an email software company that was acquired by Salesforce a few months after I started working there. And I remember one of the first projects that I worked on was a a series of customer stories that were for the Australian market. And I remember our Australian colleagues, they were like so excited to get these customer stories. And I was like, Okay, I'm glad you guys are so excited, but I've never heard of these brands before, right? And so it's a perfect example where that's really impactful.

Heike Young (11:42.296)
to people that live that that that are in that target market. We can't use the company page to speak to every single region in their own language, to post every single local customer story. What we can do is lift up the individual profiles of people in all those different regions. And hey, if you're in Belgium, great, post in your local language. If you're wherever you are in the world, you post about that local thing, that I guarantee is really gonna it's really going to grow.

Perception of your brand in that area and make it so much more relevant to those people personally than some big global strategy. So that's what I would do. And you know, longer answer because this really is a big part of the strategy, but I would start with the overall strategy goals. Then I would try to find a mix of people around those three areas, seniority level, rule type and and region.

Rhona Pierce (12:31.22)
I absolutely love how you broke that down because yeah, all of that is so important. And the example that you gave about the regional thing, it's a hundred percent. As someone who's not from the US and has worked when I was back home, I would work for companies here and stuff like that. It's like totally, totally different the experience and how you talk to your the the consumers there in your region. So that is that's a really good win. And also the

the difference of of the roles. I think a lot of companies think, well, our software is for marketers, so we need all of our marketing people and everyone who knows marketing talking about it. But it's like the customer service people, like you said, also have like really, really great perspective because they're the ones talking to these marketers every day as well.

Heike Young (13:18.088)
People would be amazing. I just saw an incredible Instagram series from the luggage company away, where they had their VP of product and product design doing this series about how they made certain product choices and what the end result is for the consumer. So imagine that in a B2B context, right? Like your product team is literally explaining: hey, we made these really impactful updates. Like, here's what we're doing for you. Here's it doesn't just have to be the ICP.

can be from prismatic perspective of different role types within your org.

Rhona Pierce (13:52.834)
Yeah. So, okay, this is all set. They we know what we're gonna talk about. everything's great. We're all on the same page. Wow, HR marketing, everyone's like, Yes, we all own this. What actually drives your engineer or your product manager or your salesperson or product person to want to build a presence online? Cause this is really what they're doing.

Heike Young (14:18.56)
It's really hard and I mean w okay, so I'll start with you. When you got started, what was your motivation in starting a post on LinkedIn?

Rhona Pierce (14:27.302)
I had just transitioned from being a software engineer and project and product manager into talent acquisition, into recruiting. And I was absolutely not going to be doing any cold calls. I've never done a cold call in my life. and I wasn't gonna be doing any of that. What I knew I was gonna do is tell other engineers, I'm one of you and I'm recruiting you, and that's my first LinkedIn post.

Heike Young (14:55.96)
Wow. Okay. And so that you had kind of this career vision and posting on LinkedIn really tied into that. For me, I would say one of the main reasons that I began to post on LinkedIn was that I wanted to learn a new creative format, which was essentially I wanted to build the skill of editing videos. I felt like I've been this head of content at these huge organizations.

Yet I don't personally know how to DIY the most dominant format on the internet today, which is video. And so I really wanted to learn how to make videos. And I thought I would just kind of do it in public. You know, why not? If I look a little silly, that's fine. Maybe I'll inspire somebody else. And so I share this because, Rona, I think that there are so many different ways that people get motivated to post. Like your story was kind of different from mine. I think if I sat down

70 people. I recently had a workshop where I had like 70 people in person and I was doing like a LinkedIn training for them. I love doing them in person. It's my favorite thing in the world is getting to see people in real life get excited about their personal brand and starting to post on LinkedIn and how this might help bolster their brand perception as well. And you know, whenever I ask, like what might motivate you to do this, I always get different answers. And so I think depending on

Types of people you're working with, what motivates them, each company culture, look, is so completely different. You're gonna have to figure out the right formula for success for your brand. Now, here are some of the things that I do believe to guide you in this direction. I would say the very best creators for your brand are probably not gonna just create tons of amazing, valuable, time-consuming content for free. They probably are going to need

Some motivations, some incentives to do that. It could be as simple as whoever gets the most LinkedIn followers over the next month gets a thousand dollars. It could be an internal leaderboard where whoever gets the most impressions in a given period, you know, they get maybe on the cheaper side, maybe they get something like lunch with a CMO. there's a lot of different ways that you could motivate people in the short term.

Heike Young (17:06.51)
I also think you could, there's some like sort of soft skills that leaders can lean into here to really motivate people, such as simple, simple things like engaging with their posts publicly. I don't think leaders realize how much it hyped up their teams if they simply go on LinkedIn and like their employees' posts and say, great job. And maybe in a meeting they say,

I wanted to let everybody know Rona just made the most amazing video for LinkedIn. You all should go check it out. Or in an email roundup to the whole company if they highlight some of the individual employees' posts. I highly recommend having an internal community for your creators. Don't just throw people to the role to the wolves, right? When I was at Microsoft, we had a Teams community for everybody that was involved in our employee influencer program on LinkedIn.

And at first, I was posting a lot of stuff in there. My team, you know, my team and I were posting a lot. We were like, hey, don't forget to post about this. This week, everybody go, you know, post about this event or post about this report or whatever it was. People would also start to ask a lot of questions. They'd be like, Heike, can you remind me? Like, what should the aspect ratio be for a video? Or how long should a video be? Over time, that community became very self-sufficient. And it was like they were answering each other's questions and they really began to, you know, one person would ask something, somebody else would say,

yeah, I'll let Heike chime in, but my experience is dot, dot, dot. And so highly, highly recommend a community like that. That in and of itself, wow, what a powerful motivator to keep people going is just the support of their leaders and their peers. So, you know, there's other things you can do. I think giving people access to really good tools to do this stuff, like video editing tools, having tools that come preloaded with things like.

the kind of captions you want them to use, the color of text boxes that you want them to use. There's great tools that do all of these things. You can also do something like a buddy system. So everybody gets a buddy and then, you know, they hype each other up and they kind of keep each other going. I can keep going, you know, the leaderboards and the bonuses are a great strategy. I also think just like simply training and you know, you don't have to use me, you don't have to use Rona, but like,

Heike Young (19:19.968)
I will literally come in and explain everything to your team, how to start posting on LinkedIn, how to update your profile, you know, how to make sure that your first few posts don't look totally cringe if you're a little bit worried about being vulnerable. Invest in some training. So again, you're not just asking people to throw spaghetti at the wall, and you really are investing in this, like the long term strategy that it should be. And I think that also helps people, like you asked about how to motivate them.

helps them stay motivated. If I go in and I explain to you how to do it, like that wow, that's gonna go a long way versus sending somebody an an email and just saying, you guys need to start posting on LinkedIn. Our competitors doing

Rhona Pierce (20:01.294)
I love all of the the practical ways that you gave because yes, I've done two episodes, I believe, about like compensating your employee creators. One was with a low employment lawyer, Heather Bussing, and the other one was with a compensation expert. And a lot of the what exists, like you said at the top of the episode, is the B2C companies, the altas of the world, the Sachs Fifth Avenues of the world. And the retail employees are usually at a different

pay scale than some of our B2B employees when you're talking about tech companies and stuff like that. So this is not necessarily, it's it's kind of messy actually when you're salaried to be getting this extra money. It's just like kind of like messes with your taxes and stuff. I I know that's how I felt. So it's not necessarily the money that's going to motivate, but yeah, like the training I know has always been like,

something that people are so excited about because it's just anything that they can take somewhere else, right?

Heike Young (21:05.262)
Yeah, it's gonna help them no matter what. And I think can also two other things I would add to this in terms of the early infrastructure building. If you are gonna build a program like this, one thing I always suggest people do, two things that are very important, they're very boring. Everybody, again, they want to jump to making their cool videos and starting to post. And that's great. I love the momentum and the energy behind let's get people posting.

But I wouldn't skip these two kind of boring infrastructure steps. One is your social media policy. So update that thing, just go back, dust it off. A lot of these social media policies, frankly, haven't been updated since the early days of Facebook. And companies made these social media policies for the first time. And things are they're different now, right? Like the world has changed. People are filming TikToks at work, they're becoming corporate influencers. There's podcasts like this about all of this stuff.

It's a different world. And of course, we want to have some guidelines around don't share the exact projects, you know, customer names that you're working with, don't share specifics of the projects you're working on. There's there's of course guidelines around these things that we want to provide and make it really clear for employees. But at the same time, we probably need to take a hard look at where those policies are for 2026 and 2027 and beyond. And then the other thing I would say, in addition to updating your social media policy, is you should absolutely

Add this to people's real job descriptions. If you are expecting this to be a part of someone's role moving forward, and there is investment being put into their training, and there is, you know, an expectation of them building their thought leadership profile in addition to associating it with your brand, please add it to their job description, add it to their performance reports so that you can thank them for a job well done and really measure their success. This should not be tacked on.

to somebody's job description. Like, yeah, by the way, spend hours every week making LinkedIn posts and replying to comments. That is not what we're gonna ask professional people with other responsibilities and lives to do in 2026. Like we're not doing that.

Rhona Pierce (23:18.636)
Yeah, we're we're absolutely not doing it. And I love how you talked about measuring this because yes, if the company's expecting you to doing this, investing in you doing this, they have to give you the time to do it. So I think including it in the job description naturally gives you the time to do it. It's not like and other duties as assigned. No, this is like a big thing. And also measuring it.

Heike Young (23:42.99)
Else has to come off your plate, perhaps, if you're gonna add this on.

Rhona Pierce (23:47.774)
Exactly. And as someone who sat in many job description writing workshops, exercises, whatever you call it, that's really how it goes. When you need something is so important that you have to put it there, then you start realizing, well, this doesn't take 40 hours a week. What are we removing type there? So I think that's really, really good call out. Now, the most common question I know I get, and I wonder if you've heard it too, is.

What happens when employees leave? What happens to this content?

Heike Young (24:22.414)
my gosh. This is another great thing to add into your boring infrastructure things to do when building an EGC program. So you're updating your social media policy, you're setting some guidelines for what people should post. You are adding this into job descriptions. Very important conversation to have with people, with your internal team is what do we do when somebody quits? What do we do when somebody gets another role and it's not part of their job description?

Maybe they're not even up and leaving the company. They're transferring to a different department. And that department isn't focused on employee thought leadership in the same way, right? And so there's a million different reasons why somebody could opt to no longer do this. And we need to have that conversation. I remember when I was working at Salesforce, we had a few different podcasts that were helmed by different employees. And I really clearly remember that depending on the person,

there was a couple situations where somebody had left and we were really unsure. Can we continue promoting this episode? Should we continue to put paid behind it? Like, what's what's the situation here? And so I am very intentional now with the companies that I work with that, like, hey, we need to talk about what's gonna happen. I would highly recommend just being very open with people and saying, Hey, you know, you're gonna be the face of this or that. Maybe somebody is the head of a big event or they're the face of

a podcast or whatever it is, we would love to keep using this IP in perpetuity. Like we are going to keep promoting these episodes. It's fine. It's a it's not a problem. We support you in your career no matter what. And we also want to use this content. So just like having that conversation is is a big thing. The other thing I would really, really strongly encourage companies to do if if this is a concern for you and it, you know, it's a very real one. It's a very valid one, is you de-risk your whole program by adding more people to it.

So whenever somebody's focused on just like founder thought leadership, they're like, Heike, we want you to build a LinkedIn strategy for our founder. I'm like, okay, well, who else is gonna be posting? They're like, we would really just want her for now. Like she's the most important person, you know, we're not really investing in other people. I nine times out of ten, I just tell them, like, okay, I for my money, I believe in EGC. I believe in more voices lifting up the program.

Heike Young (26:46.35)
Founder led is great. That's just not what I focus on typically. and so sometimes I will do a training for that executive, you know, give them some tips on how to film videos of themselves that they don't hate hate or whatever it is from LinkedIn. But I really believe in these multidisciplinary, multi-region programs that support a broader brand marketing strategy. And so I really think let's say you have 20 people in your program, five of them get new jobs this year.

Or something like that. And I don't even know if it might be that high. It's career cuffing season, I've heard. So people, you know, they're they're holding on to their jobs. So I don't know. Let's say five of them leave. Fine. You still have 15 amazing high quality voices posting in your market. That's 15 more than most companies have.

Rhona Pierce (27:35.338)
Yes. my goodness. I absolutely love this conversation. And it ties into to many of the things that we're seeing changing in in create content creation in general, like now how LLMs are citing vo other voices other than just the the company and stuff like that. So when you have your creators, your employees creating for you, that's getting LLM citations now.

How does that work when they leave? How do you write that? Like, can you keep using it? Do they have to take this content down? What if like there's so many things that to consider? I but I love the whole just have multiple people because inevitably, like in every single other thing, when we're planning workforce at a company, we have a plan for what happens when people leave.

this should just now be part of the plan 'cause it's twenty twenty six and this is what we talk about now.

Heike Young (28:33.666)
And as a creator, and you know, I do content consulting and I do these EGC trainings and LinkedIn trainings and such as a speaker, but I also do paid content, sponsored content for brands as a B2B creator myself. And as part of all of those negotiations, there's always a conversation about the usage, you know, are they gonna pay to promote it for how long? Employees really should not be completely different.

Yes, it's a little different. You're not paying them per post or for performance and all of that exactly. But at least in most cases that I've seen in B2B, if you're running a very fancy employee creator program like that, please reach out to me. I'd love to see more of what you're doing. But I think we still need to have those conversations as we would with an external creator about the usage and about about kind of the overall approval process, even depending on.

how how fancy the content is getting and how it's going to be used in a campaign. You might even want to have a conversation about like, okay, we're planning to put tons of money behind your video or whatever. Like, does it need to be approved by someone? And I'm certainly not advocating for some a process where we're trying to, you know, stifle people's voices or anything like that. But we we simply need to go into it with our eyes open the same way we would with an external creator.

Rhona Pierce (30:00.182)
And I know my HR folks that are listening are like, my gosh, no, if it's an employee, we own it forever, just like we own any of the other work and stuff like that. And I would just challenge us all to think about this differently because like you said, they can e this is how you do it when you I also do create content for brands and stuff like that. It's always part of the conversation, the usage rights and stuff like that. So I think the way at least I could

I see it and maybe you disagree is if y the way you do it in your company is too rigid, that person with the skills just gonna go create that content for someone else.

Heike Young (30:41.738)
Mm. A hundred percent. And I think, I think we're getting to a place in this conversation where the best employee creators are they have one of the most in demand skill sets in B2B. They have influence and they have distribution. So yeah, honey, you better believe the competitors are gonna come knocking at the door once they see

my, this person's a bona fide thought leader and they have influence over the ICP and they've got this distribution model where they're cranking out incredible high-quality content every single week and they have a track record of doing it, honey. Yes, they are gonna be highly sought after. And so it goes back to your reward system and motivation, you know, your approval processes. You don't wanna be too rigid and you don't want to make this hard for people. They're using their channels for you. And on average, we do see that individual profiles.

get eight to twelve times the organic reach of company profiles on LinkedIn. So yeah, they're they're helping your brand out in a big, big way. So we gotta we gotta make sure this is worth everybody's while.

Rhona Pierce (31:46.702)
So switching gears a tad bit. and I heard someone recently refer to this as full stack creator program, right? Where you have your EGC, your employee-generated content, your UGC, your user-generated content, which is usually from customers, and then your IGC with your industry influencers. And that's what a lot of marketing teams are working on and doing right now. How do these three layers feed into each other?

So that it feels like a cohesive engine.

Heike Young (32:19.778)
my gosh. Well, you're speaking my language. so I have a framework on my LinkedIn that it's on my featured. So if you come to Heike Young, my name is H E I K E, you're on the go. You know, can't look at your phone right now. It's H E I K E Young. And one of my top featured links is a content and brain marketing framework that I call people generated content. And yeah, you can call it IGC, EGC, you know, there's different acronyms for it, but

Going back to what I said at the top of the episode, you know, I think I have simply learned time and time again over my career that brands don't land the way people do. Right? The brand guidelines, trying to get everything to sound the same, trying to make it so corporate and so so samey, samey, it's just leading to people totally tuning it out. And now with AI making everything just more and more of the same.

It's worse than ever. And so really the only way to differentiate and add that spice and stop a scroll is through people. People want to hear from other people. In fact, they don't want to hear from brands at all. They only want to hear from people. And so the way it's it's very similar to what you just shared, but the way that I have broken it down in my framework. And by the way, this framework, you know, kind of went viral. I think it has over a thousand

likes on LinkedIn. And that seems like a lot for a B2B content strategy framework. It's not a lot for like a good recipe or something, but it's pretty good for like a B2B content strategy framework. So I recommend you come over and look at it and you'll see the visual of what I am describing. But it's really the brand and these three groups of human beings working together to create content on behalf of the brands. It's the execs and employees, so the EGC bucket. It's the industry creators, so more of the paid influencer SME bucket, and it's your

Customers. It's the people using your products every single day. And so at the very top level, the brand is the one that sets the strategy and activates the humans. Here is exactly what I mean by that. The brand sets the tone, the objectives, the audience. Who are we even trying to reach? The key moments. So, like the calendar, is it, you know, we're doing can, we're doing holiday marketing and Black Friday, we're doing X, Y, and Z things. We've got a product launched in September.

Heike Young (34:33.631)
Market moments, very important. All of that is really important to lay this out so that your content is coming out at strategic times throughout the year. And just the topics. So that is what the brand does. The brand orchestrates that layer. Then those three buckets of humans, the execs and employees, the industry influencers, and the customers, they are all empowered to post in their own voices, right? They're empowered to talk about things from their own POV.

And you know, I think in my full framework for this, you can see how much each of them tends to cost and when it is best deployed. And then at the very end of this whole thing, all of that content that those three groups are creating, the the execs and employees, the industry influencers and the customers, that is all going back and fueling the brand. So people are posting things, they are tagging the brand or not, depending on what the content is.

But no matter what, it is fueling the brand. And the brand is getting a lot out of this because people are tagging the brand in some situations, growing the brand's audience and credibility. The people are really showing the brand what kind of content is performing. It's basically a testing engine that's constantly testing new POVs, new angles, new hooks for you. And you're learning from that content and saying, interesting. So this customer's video.

Got 500 likes on TikTok. This video, this was like this other video over here. We thought this one was really gonna perform because it's our core messaging. It got like 10 likes. So this is a really important lesson and takeaway for us as we test all of this content at scale. I kind of hate saying at scale, but you know what I mean. Yeah. And and it creates kind of this ability for the brand to upcycle all of the best performing content to the brand.

Channels. And so I did this when I was running my EGC program on LinkedIn when I was at Microsoft, leading content in social, was like the best performing videos and the best performing posts from our execs and employees. I would literally upcycle that exact post, post it from the brand account. I'd be like, yeah, CMO Rona talking about our new research report. Check it out. And so I already knew that that content was seated in the market and it performed well.

Heike Young (36:50.816)
Absolutely use it again and again. You as a brand, you get sick of your content so much faster than your audience and that your customers do. So use it again and again. All of these things working together, that is a people-generated content engine.

Rhona Pierce (37:07.008)
Love it. I I love how similar and again for anyone listening or watching, I didn't know all of this before. I'm literally just asking questions and we're finding out, like, my gosh, yes, we believe the exact same thing. So it it's always cool to interview people who are like fighting the good fight of EGC.

Heike Young (37:29.976)
From more of like an HR side historically, like you were more on the recruiting side. I've never had a job like that. I've always been on the brand marketing side. And it's like we have all arrived at the same place. What's hard is getting all these departments to work together, right? Like we know that this is challenging. We've talked a little bit realistically in this podcast about it today.

But it's like, yeah, you have this deep experience in your subject matter. And I come from this brand marketing POV, and we're all seeing these same themes. And so really the question doesn't become, do you need to do this? It's just like, how are you gonna do it? And how long are you gonna run from it? People are really scared of it because it does require, you know, those conversations about, what can people post and how will we reward them? And it just becomes

scary and so you know, people kinda they kinda run away. It's like, yeah, maybe if you know, maybe if the CMO posts a couple of times a quarter about our earnings, like that's enough.

Rhona Pierce (38:32.558)
I we could talk about this for hours and hours and hours, but I want to to flip it a little for the employee for a second, because a lot of the listeners of this show are currently working in corporate and they create content on the side. They do brand deals, all of that fun stuff, right? So someone's building their presence on company time.

about company topics, what should they be getting out of it? And like what should they be asking before they start?

Heike Young (39:07.34)
think that for employees, look, couple things I would say. I think that there's some people that are never gonna see the value of doing this. And that's okay. This isn't the creating the cr content creation path is not for everyone. And what I have learned through doing a lot of these workshops and I've gone into different companies and

Person and I've been with you know hundreds of people this year in virtual meetings for their companies or have been trying to train people to make content. What I have learned is that you really don't want to force this because we can all tell. And so if somebody is not gonna be that employee creator, that their heart and soul isn't in creating content, I don't think they should do it, to be honest. And I think that people, if you have

The urge to create content, you know who you are. If you go to bed thinking about a story, something that happened in your day, and you just want to tell people about it. Like if it's on your heart to share that with people, my gosh, do it. Like the universe is telling you something. If you are, you know, you're telling stories to your kids at night and you're reading books and you're like, wow, that makes me think of an analogy for my industry. Like, this is how I would actually explain this topic for people.

Please, like you've got that spark inside of you. Like I want to help those people give them the tools they need to show up authentically and with, you know, not spending so much time on it. Like I talked to somebody the other day and she was like, I want to make videos, but it's taking me seven hours to make a 30-second video. I'm like, let me help you, Queen. Like you are somebody I can help. I can give you tips and tricks and actually make this process easier for you.

Because you already have shown that it's a passion for you. And so, like, let me help you. I don't want to help the person who's sulking in the corner and is like, well, I just don't see how this connects to my job. And there look, there's nothing wrong. It might not connect to your job. I'm not saying it absolutely does. It might not connect, right? And so if you see the value, I believe you should move forth through this path. I think you should if it's on your heart to create content.

Heike Young (41:32.322)
You should do it, whether it's for your company or for yourself. If it's somebody that's not totally figuring out how the dots connect, I think we as people maybe know, maybe somebody listening to this is like you're trying to stand up an EGC program at your company. I think we can show those people the way. I'm not saying to give up and just say, you don't see the value. Screw you. Like I'm building my program without you. That's not what I'm saying.

What I'm saying is there's a certain type of person that intrinsically sees this value and really just needs that boost and those operational systems and that motivation to do it, right? That is who we really want to empower through through this program.

Rhona Pierce (42:16.236)
Yeah, yeah. And and I would add that for anyone wanting to to start a program like this, as you're looking at people, and yeah, we talked about including it in their job description and stuff like that. Be open to the different types of content creation because content creation isn't just videos on TikTok or LinkedIn. Maybe you have someone who's an amazing writer and they're gonna write 1500 words for you.

All day long. That's not my ministry. Yeah, can I do it? Sure. But I'm more of a like, let's do short form stuff like that. Let me sit and yap all day long and I'll do that. There's other people who absolutely love speaking and they'll go to every single conference on your behalf and speak. These are the things that like open up a little what you're thinking of when you're creating your EGC programs because it's not just the

Posting on social media, the likes, the reach, the engagement and all of that stuff. There's so many other ways of doing this.

Heike Young (43:17.246)
Yes. And well, I'm gonna start saying that's not my ministry. It's just so beautiful. Thank you for saying that. wow, that was that was so so nicely said. But I also think there's an element of this, which is we don't just wanna give the louder people an even bigger microphone. That is not what is happening here. And some of my favorite people to follow.

And LinkedIn and on YouTube and you know everywhere that I listen to podcasts, etc. A lot of my favorite people to follow are not what who people who will probably consider themselves extroverts. Like they don't want to be the center of attention, but they have knowledge that they wanna share. And so I think and Goldie, my friend Goldie, Chan, she lives she lives in LA and we were talking about this recently. I live in LA for those you're like, why did you mention she lives in LA? Sorry, I live here.

Met with her recently where she has done some great thinking around like an e an introvert's guide to building your personal brand. I think this kind of conversation is so important because we don't just want to like imagine I'm probably aging myself with this, but imagine you know the movie High School Musical. The original high school musical. So they put up like audition flyers in the high school. They're like, okay, who's gonna audition for the school musical?

Rhona Pierce (44:33.782)
So

Heike Young (44:42.784)
Well, clearly the theater kids who show up to every audition and they wanna be front and center, they wanna be in the spotlight, clearly the they're the first ones to write their name on the board and they've got like their big, you know, if you're listening to this, you can't see me. I'm you know, I'm doing a big dramatic autograph in the air. You know, they're like signing their name and a big swoopy pink feather pen. They're like, I wanna be up there, I wanna audition.

Well, there's all these other kids who are in the corner and they're like, I kind of want to audition, but I'm not sure, sort of a thing. We've like, we absolutely want to help those people feel empowered to share their voices. You have to understand, I think, when you are there's like so many soft skills that go into these types of programs. You have to understand, is somebody saying they don't want to participate because they don't see the value for their role, which is like pretty valid, or

Is it because they are feeling vulnerable and scared and they have things they want to say but they don't know how to say them? And those are two very different groups of people.

Rhona Pierce (45:48.344)
I absolutely love that. And I've I've loved this conversation. So let's say someone's listening, they are ready. No matter if they're in marketing or a senior leader, they want to start building an internal creator program this quarter. What's the first step they should take this week?

Heike Young (46:07.086)
First thing to do before you do anything else, it's like very simple. Just get out like a piece of paper and a pen. Don't open Google Slides. Don't make any decks, please. Let's not make decks until we have a strategy in mind. I would just write down all the things that you're hoping this program would do for you. In an ideal world, what is this gonna do for your brand?

That list could be 200 things long. I don't know. Your hand might cramp up. I know mine would. I don't write my hand very much anymore. You know what? Actually, yeah, you could do this as a whisper flow if you wanted to. You don't have to get out the paper. I'll change that. You could do either one. And then I would start to find clusters of goals. It's like amplifying our brand, building our thought leadership profile, getting more specific with who you're trying to build your thought leadership for and toward and all of these things.

Try to find out some of those areas of commonality where you really see the potential here. And it's not just posting more on LinkedIn because our competitors are everywhere. It's really like, what are you really hoping to get out of this? Start to find some of those clusters and bigger areas of commonality. And then with that in mind, you can go back to your leadership team and say, hey, I have an idea for a program that can really help us do X.

Y and C. This is the impact that I want to have this year, and this is how I'm hoping to do it. This matches up perfectly with these KPIs that we set back in January or February or June at the beginning of the fiscal. Let's find a way to join these things together. And so I would really start with the goals, not start from a place of we want to get people posting on LinkedIn. That is the tactic and we want to start with the strategy. Okay. And you can do this in Whisperflow. That's fine.

Rhona Pierce (47:51.859)
Love it. where can folks connect with you?

Heike Young (47:56.258)
Well, I don't have LinkedIn. I'm just kidding. Find me on LinkedIn. H-E-I-K-E, is how you spell my name. If you weren't making notes earlier, I'm Heika. And Heika Young, you can find me on LinkedIn and then I also lay out a little bit more about what I do on my website. It is haika-young dot com. I would I think like, I don't know, as people are kind of listening to this, and if you're thinking like we want to do something like this and we're not sure.

I give away a radical amount of information for free. I get on a phone with a lot of brands and like give them tips on their strategy. Like I I believe in this so much, and I believe it's the future of B2B marketing so much that I'm kind of like willing to just like do whatever I can to usher in this new chapter. And so, like, yeah, work with me, work with Rona. We like we want to help you succeed.

Rhona Pierce (48:51.267)
Ha ha

Rhona Pierce (48:55.564)
Yes, yes, a hundred percent. And I will link all of that. But yes, truly, like you saw, Heika has so much information. Work with her. and of course you guys know work for Lancer Media, we're here to produce all of that content, but she's really can help you with the strategy and all of that behind it and just setting up the program.

Heike Young (49:15.79)
Because I don't have a fancy production company. I don't have like, I don't have a way to make all this. What I do have is ways to help this tie into your content and social strategy and help you train people to, you know, make their videos. Like I help people get less scared. Like I'm gonna, I'm kind of your your therapist, your content therapist, and Rona's gonna make it happen.

Rhona Pierce (49:40.748)
And I'm your GSD person. That's that's my framework. It's called GSD. so yes. I would I will link all of that information. Thank you. Thank you so much for being on the show today. if you're enjoying the workfluencer pod, share it with someone who's changing how we talk about work or who should be. And hey, if this episode gave you ideas or inspiration,

Heike Young (49:55.502)
Thank you for having me.

Rhona Pierce (50:07.316)
Leave us a five-star review. Reviews help other listeners find us. And honestly, it makes my day. This show is produced by Workfluencer Media. Visit Workfluencermedia.com to learn how we help companies build video-first content systems that attract, engage, and retain qualified talent. That's Workfluencer Media.com. Thanks for listening, and I'll chat with you next week.