With Great Brand Culture Comes Great Employee Advocacy

During a visit to the NASA space centre in 1962, U.S. President John F. Kennedy noticed a janitor carrying a broom. He interrupted his tour, walked over to the man and said, “Hi, I’m Jack Kennedy. What are you doing?” “Well, Mr. President,” the janitor responded, “I’m helping put a man on the moon.” 

To most people, this janitor was just cleaning the building. But in the more mythic, larger story unfolding around him, he was helping to make history.

That a janitor is so well-aligned with the mission and vision of NASA is the result of a great brand culture.

What is a brand culture?

The e-book Telling Your Brand Story from Zoho Academy states:

Your brand’s story is much more than your “company bio.” It’s everything from the colors on your website to your packaging materials to the way your employees answer the phone and banter with your customers on social media. It includes your origins, your goals, your inspiration, your challenges, your target audience and their experiences with your company. It’s even the stuff you don’t have control over, including how your prospects and customers perceive what you do and interpret what you say. In short, it’s the sum total of who you are, all you do, and everything people believe about you based on the signals you send.

When your brand story is consistent and has been owned by every stakeholder of your company, it creates a solid brand culture.

Zappos is a good example of a brand that is very proud of its culture. Even the interview and hiring process at Zappos are designed to learn about the candidate's compatibility to fit in Zappo's organizational culture (50% weightage).

If a candidate is hired by Zappos, they can expect to spend their first three to four weeks manning phones in their call center learning how to respond to customer needs. This, in a way, is an introduction to the soul of the business. Upon completion of their time in the call center, Zappos employees are offered $3,000 to leave the company. If you haven't become a Zappos insider, committed to the goals and the culture, the company really prefers that you leave. Take the money, though, and you can never come back.

What happens when your employees are aligned with your brand culture?

They tell your story to the world.

When your employees share your story widely, it gives your brand a word of mouth boost, which is better than any form of marketing. [A report from Pew Research Centre found that word of mouth was the top point of influence for buyers.]

Let's do some quick math. I'll try to calculate the organic reach of your social media post with some assumptions. Say your brand has 300K fans on facebook while you have 200 employees who are active on social media and can share positively about your brand from their profile.

When you post from your brand page, your organic reach is this:

300,000 X 6.4% (average organic reach of an FB post) = 19,200 impressions

When your employees post about you:

200 advocates X 338 friends each (avg. number of friends) X 33% of friends seeing the post = 22,308 impressions

Remember, the average organic reach of a Facebook post is declining every year, so the posts from your brand page are going to fetch you less and less views in coming years.

Employee advocacy will be your positive word-of-mouth marketing that helps create a favorable brand image with larger organic reach. It will also help you fetch the right talent when you have a job opening.

How to convert employees into brand advocates

Sending a memo asking employees to be your brand advocates is a bad idea. Asking someone to write positively about you in public will always prompt a "what's-in-it-for-me?" attitude from the employee. Instead, win over them and trust them to post naturally.

Some employees will already be posting more about your business than others or have a more engaged audience. Identify your top socially active employees and give them the opportunity to build their thought leadership further by including them in your social media strategy.

Here are few actionable tips:

1. Brand culture: Like how the janitor at NASA, your employees—no matter their department—should own your brand's vision. Cultivate this by re-iterating the vision and goal in meetings, emails to employees, your own social media posts, posters around the office, and through your actions. For example, start office yoga classes if your vision is related to health or fitness. Don't let your folks forget what you're working to achieve.
   
2. SWAG: Who doesn't like a cool swag? Give your employees a t-shirt, a coffee mug, or even a cool hat with your logo on it. If they love your swag, there are two advantages: one, they will advocate about it in their social media space, and two, when they wear the swag in public, it's free advertising for you. Plus, swag increases the bonding between companies and employees.
   
3. Celebrations: Celebrate days like Employee Appreciation Day, which falls on the first Friday of every March. Make your team members feel important and appreciated.
   
4. Indirect campaign: Start a social media campaign with a hashtag and send a mailer inviting employees to participate. For example, "Best Selfie with colleague wins a prize. Use hashtag #(YourBrandName)Fun." You could also have them host a Twitter chat around a topic in your industry or perhaps help them create a longer piece of content like a blog post or video that you can then promote on both the employee’s Twitter account and on your brand account.
   
5. Surprises: Surprise and delight your employees by sending them gifts on their birthdays or anniversaries. They might spread the word. Worth a shot!
   

Once you organically convert your employees into brand advocates, they will begin posting positive things they experience in the workplace—whether morning yoga, team lunch, employee appreciation gifts, or an employee awards function. As they start sharing their experiences with the world, your brand will get the right kind of exposure—and hopefully increased traffic via genuine word-of-mouth marketing.

• Topic Participants

• Vinit Tibrewal

  

• Sticky Posts

• 10 simple e-commerce marketing tips to boost sales

  Congratulations! You've finally set up that e-commerce store you've been thinking about for a long time. Hopefully it wasn't too difficult. Even if it was, the effort will be totally worth it when you start seeing some orders come through. Now that the store is live, let's take a look at some marketing tips you can apply for sales growth. 1. Avoid cart abandonment If you've ever shopped online, you might have added a product to the cart but then decided not to purchase it. This is known as cart abandonment.

• Marketing in a post COVID-19 world!

  Consumers across countries are increasingly spending more time on a wide variety of digital activities, right from online grocery shopping, to video conferencing, to tele-medicine. There is a good chance that you performed one or more of the following activities during this lockdown, thanks to COVID 19: Cooked a meal Made a TikTok Video Signed up for a remote learning session Consulted a doctor online (or ordered medicines online) Shopped for groceries online A study by Hunter, a food and beverage

• Inbound Marketing 101: The Foundational Blocks of Inbound Marketing Strategy

  According to a behaviour survey, 68% of the buyers use sources such as blogs to evaluate the product even before considering it. Before buying a product, we do a lot of research to learn more about the product through communities, blogs, social media,

• How Zylker doubled their webinar registrations!

  Webinars are good educational resources to gather qualified leads for your product. But what if your visitors are dropping off from your webinar landing page without signing up? What more could you do to convert visitors into registrants? This is the

• The ideology behind why features tell, but benefits sell

  Do you think there's any truth to this? Do features only tell, and benefits sell?  Well, let's see why we should focus on benefits rather than features as the great marketing wizards, David Ogilvy and Steve Jobs proved to be the best examples leveraging

• Recent Topics

• Custom Fields with Data Types for Expense and Payments Received in Zoho Books

  Hi all, We are glad to present to you, the option to create Custom Fields for the Expense and Payments received modules in Zoho Books. This also comes with an icing on top of it - Yes, the custom fields can now be created with different data types. Types like Text, Number, Decimal, Amount, Auto Number and Check Box are supported as of now. Rush to the gear icon at the top right corner, select 'More Settings', choose 'Preferences' in the left pane. Click the Expense/Payment preferences where you can

• Zoho Cliq - Incident alert (Server outage - IN DC) | August 28

  We've received server down alerts and are currently investigating the issue (IN DC) to find the root cause. Our team is actively working to restore normal operations at the earliest. Status: Under investigation Start time: 09:44:21 AM IST Affected location:

• Claude + MCP Server + Zoho CRM Integration – AI-Powered Sales Automation

  Hello Zoho Community 👋 I’m excited to share a recent integration we’ve worked on at OfficehubTech: ✅ Claude + MCP Server + Zoho CRM This integration connects Zoho CRM with Claude AI through our custom MCP Server, enabling intelligent AI-driven responses

• How can I see content of system generated mails from zBooks?

  System generated mails for offers or invices appear in the mail tab of the designated customer. How can I view the content? It also doesn't appear in zMail sent folder.

• Limitations on editing a message in Cliq

  Hi I've checked the documentations and there's no mention of how many times a message can be edited. When trying with code, I get various numbers such as ~1000 edits or so. Please mention if there's a limit on how many times one can change a message via

• Narrative 10: Assignment Rules - Streamlining Ticket Management

  Behind the scenes of a successful ticketing system: BTS Series Narrative 10: Assignment Rules - Streamlining Ticket Management In the complex world of customer support, a flood of incoming tickets can hit the help desk in seconds. Businesses must do more

• Free webinar! Digitize recruitment and onboarding with Zoho Sign and Zoho Recruit

  Hello, Tired of being buried in onboarding paperwork? With the integration between Zoho Sign and Zoho Recruit, a powerful applicant tracking system, you can digitize and streamline the entire recruitment and onboarding process, all from one platform.

• Custom form - Duplicate Value Present

  I am new to Zoho People. I create a new form on Zoho People quite simple. A date (by default the current date) and a radio button with 3 options (Yes, No, Not applicable) I defined the date as ‘No duplicate’ as only one entry by date is allowed. I added:

• Zoho API connection issues

  Hi, Today at around 1930 GMT our application started experiencing intermittent timeouts from the Zoho API. These intermittent timeouts are not enabling our app to work properly. The API connection was working just fine before. HTTPSConnectionPool(host='www.zohoapis.com',

• Query Regarding our Partnership between AIC-JKLU and Zoho

  Dear Zoho Team, I am writing to raise a concern on behalf of AIC-JKLU, one of Zoho’s incubator partners. Recently, our startups have been facing difficulties while trying to get themselves onboarded on Zoho through our dedicated partner link. Unfortunately,

• Disputed Purchase Invoices

  We have recently moved to Zoho Books from Sage. In Sage we were able to post a purchase/vendor invoice but mark it as on dispute. This would usually be a pricing query or if something was damaged. It would show in their ledger, so we could agree their

• Getting events in the future

  Hi I am trying to get events in the future by calling this API Endpoint https://www.zohoapis.eu/crm/v8/Events?fields=Event_Title,Created_By,Created_Time,Start_DateTime But that gives me all events in the database. How do I make a query that returns all

• Created Date/Invalid Fields

  Since Saturday we have suddenly had issues with our webhooks and data retrieval from CRM. Specifically how Created Date is handled. It appears there was some sort of change within CRM that broke a lot of our code that has been in place for several years.

• add employees and customiz

  I want a Zoho software to track employees record. I logged in a demo so now I tried adding employee, first thing when I click on add employee it takes me to a page where it says add user maximum 10 users, my first doubt why users I don't want employees

• Revenue Management: #9 Revenue Recognition in Media & Publishing

  Media & Publishing industry has evolved in recent times. It offers subscriptions, bundles digital and print access, runs sponsored content, and sometimes even sells ad spaces. If you run a media or publishing business, you will always get into a situation

• Zoho CRM Community Digest - July 2025 | Part 2:

  Hello, Everyone! We’re closing out July with a can’t-miss highlight: Zoholics Europe 2025! Happening from September to October, it’s your chance to level up your CRM skills, covering everything from automation and CPQ to dashboards and advanced workflows.

• How can I trigger a flow action only once while updating contact?

  Hi, we have a trigger to merge&mail file when the field YYY is filled out. For this acion I used "Create or update module entry". But unfortunately we get tens of email on a day with this merged file, because the contact is being regularly updated. The

• Copy a Record Template from one Form to another

  I have a Creator application with several forms.  I developed a record template for one of the reports/forms but want to use most of it for another of the form/report combinations in the application. Is there a way to copy the template (code or otherwise) to another form?

• Tip of the Week #70 – Create common team signatures for your shared inboxes

  Did you know that a small detail, such as an email signature, can make a big difference in how your brand is perceived? One simple yet smart way to enhance your team’s communication is by creating common team signatures for your shared inboxes. Instead

• Enhanced data export features: XLSX format, custom character encoding, and selective record export

  Greetings all, Here are a few enhancements related to exporting CRM data, including the ability to export data in XLSX file format now. The Export feature under Data Administration now offers new options that expand its flexibility and enable users to

• Tip #42 – How to manage data security with Privacy Settings – 'Insider Insights'

  Data privacy is a cornerstone of trust in remote support. Through Privacy Settings in Zoho Assist, you can set up how data is gathered, stored, and handled in your organization. These settings ensure compliance, data protection for sensitive details,

• Zoho DataPrep and File Pattern configuration

  I'm using Zoho data prep to ingest data from One Drive into Zoho Analytics... The pipeline is super simple but I can't any way to get all the files that I need. Basically I need to bring all the files with a certain pattern and for that I'm using a regex

• Introducing Dark Mode / Light Mode : A New Look For Your CRM

  Hello Users, We are excited to announce a highly anticipated feature - the launch of Day, Night and Auto Mode implementation in Zoho CRM's NextGen user interface! This feature is designed to provide a visually appealing and comfortable experience for

• Quick Item Search & Auto-suggestion for Invoices

  Hi Team, I am facing an issue while creating invoices in Zoho Books. Currently, I have to type the full item name in the correct sequence and spelling for it to appear. For example, my item name is: "Distemper Acri Silk Special White 10kg" If I type something

• Ticketbai! en el Pais Vasco

  Hola a todos, En enero de 2.022 se va a implantar en el país vasco un nuevo sistema de facturación, denominado ticketbai!, ¿hay alguna previsión de realizar las adaptaciones en zoho books o zoho invoices? Ignoro la cantidad de clientes que tienen estas

• Zoho CRM mobile app feature update: home page widgets, field tooltips and user image upload

  Hello everyone! Your business doesn't pause when you're on the move, and neither should your CRM. That's why in our latest update, we've introduced a few new features to make your mobile CRM experience smoother and more efficient. Let's take a quick look

• Zoho CRM Plain Text Template: Line Breaks and Formatting Issue

  Hello, I'm following the instructions to create email templates in Zoho CRM, but I'm having a problem with the plain text version. https://help.zoho.com/portal/en/kb/zoho-sign/integrations/zoho-apps/zoho-crm/articles/zoho-crm-email-templates#Steps_to_create_a_custom_email_template

• Optimizing Task Handling: Auto-Remove Recurrence for cancelled Tasks.

  Hello Everyone, A Custom function is a user-written set of code to achieve a specific requirement. Set the required conditions needed as when to trigger using the Workflow rules (be it Tasks / Project) and associate the custom function to it. Requirement:

• Important updates to your connectors

  Hello everyone, Greeting from Zoho Creator! We're excited to announce that we'll be rolling out significant backend updates to Zoho Creator's built-in connectors to enhance security by following the latest frameworks. The existing version of some of the

• Create, collaborate, and manage agreements with Zoho Sign

  Agreements drive business. We launched Zoho Sign in 2017 as a simple digital signature tool to sign agreements from anywhere, at any time. Over the years, we've learned that most agreements go through last-minute changes before they're signed. Our users

• Function #25: Automatically generate purchase orders from a sales order

  We kicked off the "Function Fridays" series with the goal of helping you automate your everyday accounting tasks. As we delve into today's post, I'm delighted to announce that we're here to present the 25th custom function in this series. While it is

• DNS set up

  I want to create an email with my company domain. When I tried to add new record with cloudflare it didn't work. The DNS record can't be manually added. I followed the instruction but still can't add it. Could you help?

• hiding a topic from all but one segment (or list)

  My organization sends out a number of newsletters using Zoho Campaigns. One of those newsletters is for volunteers. In order to become a volunteer, a person has to first go through our volunteer orientation (training). After that, they can receive newsletters

• How do I set up this automation correctly?

  When contacts enter my Subscribers list, I want it to reference a custom field to see if it is empty. Then I want it to do two things: If empty: Assign a tag based on a different custom field. If that custom field is empty, assign a different tag. If

• Function #62: Display associated Quote on Invoice details screen

  Hello everyone! Today, we are sharing a Related List script that makes it easy to view and access the quote from which an invoice was created right from the invoice details screen. This Related List displays the Quote number and Amount, allowing you to

• Custom confirmation message

  How can I change the message that users see after they submit the booking form? I have to confirm some details before their appointment is officially "confirmed", so I want to change it where it doesn't say their appointment is "confirmed" but rather

• Desk x CRM Integration

  Howdy! We currently use SalesIQ but we are considering moving across to Desk as it seems to have more functionality that we want. One of the pulls is the ability for our customers to self serve. But, I might be getting over excited and not actually need

• Function #53: Transaction Level Profitability for Invoices

  Hello everyone, and welcome back to our series! We have previously provided custom functions for calculating the profitability of a quote and a sales order. There may be instances where the invoice may differ from its corresponding quote or sales order.

• Issue with Save & Share Link – Works for Others but Not Creator

  I’ve enabled the "Save and Share" feature in Zoho Forms, and it works correctly for all users accessing the public link—except for me (the form creator). Issue Details: When I save and share the link, recipients see a “no permission” error. The form is

• Save the pdf report from a registration form in a Folder

  Through Zoho Forms I created a registration form with quite a lot of rules to handle different variables (TEAM types, payment in installments, etc.), and the result is pretty good. The automatic PDF that is sent to the respondent upon submission is already

• Next Page