Employee Created Content vs. Employee Generated Content

Employee Created Content #ECC is a fast-growing trend in modern marketing, and brands who embrace it over dated control-focused employee policies around their online presence will be positioned to speed ahead of competition. Many companies are looking at how they can best leverage their employees to help them in the never-ending need for more content. Most of those same companies are inexplicably nervous about allowing the same employees, that they trust to be the LITERAL face of the company with customers every single day, to be a small part of their online presence. Despite this anxiety, the allure of an army of humans that you already pay to work for you expanding your brand to their own networks, for free, is impossible to resist. Enter Employee Generated Content (EGC). Several years ago, tools like Dynamic Signal began to capitalize on this under-served area of the market and give brands the ability to create content for their employees to share online through their social channels. The employees had content they could share in seconds, and the brands had, at least for these very specific pieces of content, total control over the messaging. Unfortunately, we live in reality – a place that often messy and entirely uncontrollable. It’s also a place where people share content online about their lives, much of which revolves around their work. The Employee Generated Content trend ignores one important truth: employees are already writing about your brand and their experience with it. They will continue to write about your brand and their experience with it. There is nothing you can do to stop it – but you can capitalize on it. Brands often fear that employees are likely to post negative things. But the reality is that many employees are going to share special offers, sales and promotions, and encourage their friends and family to come in and purchase new items. As Walmart is already learning – employees can actually be MORE productive for your company with their smartphones. Creating content in-store is an easy way to unlock that potential. The Employee Generated Content trend ignores one important truth: employees are already writing about your brand and their experience with it. They will continue to write about your brand and their experience with it. At Photofy, we embrace the term Employee Created Content (ECC). Successful brands who trust their employees will not try to stifle what their employees say about them, but will empower it, celebrate it, and promote it… and encourage them to “create” it. Photofy gives brands tools to empower employees to create beautiful branded content quickly and easily. Brands get total transparency into all the content that is created in an easy to use dashboard, and employees get the tools to share what and how they want. A company can easily grab the best content and promote it from their own channels however they want. We’ve found that brands that empower Employee Created Content (ECC) with Photofy see an average increase of 10% in total online monthly conversation, and a ROAS of 16X. Compare the cost and scale of this content tool to any other content spend and you can easily see why brands are jumping on board. Many of our customers have upwards of 10,000 employees on the platform creating content for them daily. When you begin to do the math of what that means for reach and content volume, you’ll get how powerful this can be. Employee Created Content is the future of content marketing for brands… PERIOD. The faster brands embrace the tools to enable and support this, the better positioned they will be to own the online conversation in the future. This first appeared on Ted Rubin. Related: The Smartest People Will Never Work For You