In my fourth year at American Express, the sales enablement and social media teams were planning a program to promote our sales teams as thought leaders in their industry by curating content for them to share on LinkedIn.

However, the program stalled when it could not get the support and approval from key stakeholders. Leadership then asked me to help move the program forward.

Understanding the Risk

My first step was to meet with the stakeholders (eg, GCO, Brand Governance, PR) to understand the objections. What I heard was a collective concern that participating employees would essentially be positioning them as spokespeople for the company, which could open them up to potential comments and questions that they could or should not necessarily answer.

For me, I understood the question was no longer how to get the program approved, but how to let salespeople share content as themselves while still giving the company enough oversight to protect them and the brand.

Solution

I then addressed those main concerns by building three key guardrails into the program:

• Each salesperson signed an agreement confirming that they were posting on their own behalf.

• Before posting, they were trained on guidelines for what to share and how to share it, so the responsibility for each post rested with someone who understood the rules.

• I expanded the scope for our social moderation vendor to review their content. Funding for the program was fixed, though, so moderators could not review every post from every participant at the same time. To work within that limit, I rolled the program out in cohorts. Moderators reviewed the first cohort's posts closely. Once that group had posted for a couple of weeks without issue, moderators moved on to the next cohort, and we audited the earlier groups instead of reviewing every post. This let the program grow without a larger budget, and it gave GCO evidence at each stage rather than asking them to approve everything on a promise.

Outcome

Within six months of launching, we successfully rolled the program out across the business development team, and were then asked to extend the program to executives.

In the first year, participants saw 12X as many LinkedIn profile views, 8X as many connections, and 6X as many views of the company page.

The bigger win, to me, was when our GCO nominated the project for an innovation award and held it up as an example of how to partner with them. The team that had initially blocked the program became one of its advocates.