- Key insight: Consolidating social media tech into one platform scaled employee advocacy and social selling for BMO.
- Supporting Data: BMO's earned media value rose from under $100k to nearly $1 million in 2022.
- Expert Quote: Bank marketing consultant Lincoln Parks said earned media value is a soft metric; scrutinize participation, assumptions and conversion impact.
Source: Bullets generated by AI with editorial review
When Nicholas Nunes was promoted to director of enterprise social media at BMO in 2018, the bank had seven different point solutions for its social media tech stack.
"We had use cases that all lived on different technology with different account teams that had different metrics, different operational flows, the whole nine yards," Nunes told American Banker.
His team decided to consolidate everything into a single social media framework, and the Montreal-based bank selected the customer experience management fintech Sprinklr in early 2019 as the sole provider for its social media tech tools.
Three years later, the $1.4 trillion asset-bank grew from less than $100,000 per year in earned media value to nearly $1 million in earned media value in 2022, according to the company.
By contrast, BMO's
Lincoln Parks, founder of bank marketing agency WebMobileFusion, told American Banker that in comparison to publicly available data on employee advocacy programs, "the $1 million figure in earned media value [at BMO] is better than many standard benchmarks."
Earned media value is a metric that estimates the dollar amount of organic exposure a brand receives from social media mentions, reviews or press coverage by comparing it to the cost of paid advertising that would be needed to achieve the same visibility.
"Since we launched our employee engagement framework with Sprinklr, we've seen significant increases in adoption and engagement," Nunes said. "For value realization, we look at what we would have to pay to achieve a similar level of reach through advertising. We've seen a substantial boost in earned media value, and we've got a scalable and secure model that's now setting the industry standard."
Parks noted that earned media value is "a soft metric" and methodologies for calculating it can vary widely from one institution to another.
"It depends heavily on employee base size, sharing activity, what counts as 'earned media,' and the baseline paid-media cost," he said. "I'd frame the bank's number as strong, but I'd also want to drill into participation rate, the assumptions behind the EMV calculation, and the incremental business impact of leads and conversions to confirm how meaningful it is. Conversions are, in my opinion, the really only true way to determine this."
The BMO Share tool is an employee interface that Nunes, who is now the managing director and head of enterprise social media for BMO, oversees. Built in collaboration with Sprinklr, it is accessible to company employees via BMO's company intranet to find and share pre-approved social media posts about BMO.
"Right now about a third of our workforce is actively using one of these programs, which, if you chat with any brands and their social teams, is just incredibly hard to pull off without the right plan, the right team and really the right tech to help make it extremely easy and simple for employees to do what they need to do," Nunes said. "We have over 5,000 employees using the BMO Share tool."
Nunes said that BMO attributes the revenue generation of its social selling tools to usage by the bank's sales employees.
"Our sales teams are out there every single day driving substantial revenue impact for the bank, and one of the ways that they do that is through our social selling program," he said.
Parks said that once a consumer interacts with a social media post or clicks through a shared link, the "query strings" attached to those social media links track consumer activity and assign an eventual customer acquisition to that origin point.
"There are tools now that can track the customer journey from the minute they land on your site anonymously to the minute they make a phone call, or ultimately fill out a form or book an appointment," Parks said. "Once that's done and they are tagged in the customer CRM software, it's now easy to track that customer's interaction anytime."
Parks noted that employee-driven social media strategies work better at larger banks with a dedicated team for content creation and distribution, such as BMO.
"Social media is critical for banks to embrace and they should, because the attention is free," he said. The key is to come across as a trusted friend or consultant offering help and ideas, not as a bank pushing services."
Nunes attributes the high employee adoption of the bank's internal social media tools to their ease of use.
"We made it a seamless process for employees with two clicks to share a piece of content," Nunes said. "By contrast, many users for other advocacy solutions have focused on standalone apps that take nine to 15 steps to share a piece of content."
Nunes said that the value of BMO's social media strategy also comes from talent recruitment assisted by employee-shared social media posts.
"We've had numerous stories from recruiters talk about how prospects have seen content being shared by their team," he said. "One hundred percent of our recruiters are using our BMO Share product, and we've had numerous stories come out about how people have seen content and ended up applying for jobs at BMO because that content has made them see what living and working at BMO really feels like."
