employee_advocacy v1.0.0

name: employee_advocacy description: Design and run employee and founder advocacy programs: content banks, ready-made shareable posts, FTC-compliant disclosure, and privacy-respecting measurement. Use when asked to launch an advocacy program, build a content bank, get founders or employees posting, or measure advocacy lift.

Employee and Founder Advocacy

Purpose

Turn employees and founders into credible distribution for the company without making it feel like homework. The job has four parts: build a content bank people actually want to share from, make sharing a two-minute act, keep disclosure legal, and measure lift without surveilling anyone's personal accounts.

Workflow

1. Define the goal and the advocate pool

Pick one primary goal for the first 90 days: brand awareness, talent pipeline, website traffic, or pipeline support. Start with 5-15 volunteers who already post about work, not a company-wide mandate. Founders go first; founder-led content builds the pattern everyone else follows.

2. Build the content bank

Create a tagged library of ready-to-share items. Tag each item by topic pillar, audience role (sales, engineering, marketing, exec), and region if relevant. Cap the pipeline at 3-5 new items per week; flooding kills participation.

Each bank entry needs: title, source link, UTM-tagged share link, a suggested post draft with personalization slots, and a suggested image or pull quote. See references/content-bank.md and the starter template in assets/content-bank-starter.csv.

Rule from real programs: relevance beats volume. If someone browses the bank and shares nothing, the problem is usually that nothing felt worth putting their name on, not that the bank is too small.

3. Make sharing take two minutes

Put the bank where people already are (Slack channel, Teams, Notion, a shared doc). For each new hire, include a five-minute social briefing in onboarding: where the bank lives, how to personalize a draft, disclosure basics.

Give each item a ready-made post so the advocate's only job is adding one sentence in their own voice. Never let anyone post copy-paste identical corporate text across accounts; platforms suppress duplicated text and it reads as fake.

4. Run the founder lane in parallel

The founder posts perspective, not product. Rotate story types: customer priority stories (market insight, not pitch), transformational shift stories (where the industry is going), personal journey stories (what went wrong and what was learned). One or two posts a week beats a burst that dies. See references/founder-advocacy.md.

5. Handle disclosure before launch

In the US, an employee's job is itself a "material connection" the FTC requires disclosed when they endorse the employer's product. A bio line saying where they work does not count. Every endorsement post needs a visible disclosure in or before the post text. Train advocates once, remind quarterly, and monitor and fix questionable posts when you spot them. Full rules and wording templates in references/disclosure.md.

6. Measure in three tiers, without creepy tracking

• Tier 1, activity: shares per advocate per month, participation rate (enrolled advocates who posted at least once), engagement rate per post type.
• Tier 2, reach: organic impressions from advocacy posts, paid-media value equivalent (impressions times platform CPM benchmark), website sessions from advocacy links via UTM.
• Tier 3, business impact: leads or signups attributed to advocacy content, brand search volume trend since launch, advocacy content appearing in sales-cycle touchpoints.

Track at the link and program level (UTM tags in the bank template), never by scraping advocates' personal analytics. Report results back to the advocates themselves; seeing tangible outcomes is what keeps people sharing. Full standard and UTM scheme in references/measurement.md.

7. Keep momentum

Launch with a kickoff: one short demo, everyone shares their first post the same week. Recognize active advocates publicly (all-hands shout-outs, a simple leaderboard). Ask quarterly what people want to share more of, and prune content that gets browsed but never shared.

Output Contract

When asked to set up or support an advocacy program, deliver:

• advocacy-plan.md: goal, advocate pool, 90-day cadence, owner of the content bank.
• A populated content-bank.csv (from the starter template) with at least 10 tagged entries, each with a UTM-tagged link and a personalizable draft.
• A founder content calendar: 4 weeks of story-typed post ideas.
• measurement-baseline.md: Tier 1-3 targets, UTM scheme, and the reporting cadence.

Run bin/advocacy-audit.py content-bank.csv to check a bank for pillar gaps, missing UTM tags, and stale items before handoff.

Operating Rules

1. Never invent metrics, study results, or legal claims. Every number in this skill is attributed to a named source in references/ or the sources file; if a client asks for proof, hand them the source URL, not the claim restated.
2. Participation is voluntary. Mandatory posting cadences, forced sharing, and approval loops over 24 hours kill programs. Say this plainly if the client pushes for it.
3. Disclosure is non-negotiable. If a proposed post endorses the product without a clear disclosure, add one or decline the draft.
4. No personal-account surveillance. Measure what flows through program links and templates. Never ask for access to an advocate's private analytics or monitor accounts they didn't enroll.
5. Personalize, don't duplicate. Every shared post needs the advocate's own sentence. Identical cross-account text is a platform-suppression risk and a credibility risk.
6. Attribute statistics as reported, not guaranteed. "Startups whose founders post consistently see 33% more leads" comes from LinkedIn's Founder-Led Sales and Marketing Playbook as reported by SearchEngineJournal; treat as directional evidence, never as a promise.