Rackspace Reaches Over 60M People in 6 Months With Switch To GaggleAMP

After LinkedIn Elevate sunset its platform last year, its clients needed to find new employee advocacy platforms for their existing programs. 

Rackspace Technology, a multicloud solutions provider, used LinkedIn Elevate to bolster its social media presence for years but took this opportunity to test multiple employee advocacy platforms. Ultimately, Rackspace opted to switch to GaggleAMP because of its ease of use and dynamic activities. 

In just six months with GaggleAMP, Rackspace garnered over 4,500 clicks to its website and campaign landing pages, over 22,000 social media interactions, and reached over 60 million people on social media. Lastly, the company saves around $100,000 per month on paid social media advertising. 

When a product sunsets clients and users who stick with the advocacy platform are left at a disadvantage for a few reasons:

In this Q&A, Brooke breaks down what it was like to switch employee advocacy platforms, what her experience with GaggleAMP has been like, and what advice she has to others who need to move on from LinkedIn Elevate or any employee advocacy platform.

Q: In what ways has your program improved since transitioning from Elevate to GaggleAMP?

With GaggleAMP, we realized we have a lot more freedom than we did with Elevate. In 2020, we initiated partner Gaggles, so that allows some of our major partners like AWS to receive and share some of our co-branded posts, expanding that reach even further. 

Also, something we implemented was gamification based on the monthly data provided on the GaggleAMP Leaderboard. We paired up with our internal employee recognition program to allow awarding points to the top three Gaggle Members of the month. That’s another exciting thing we implemented with the GaggleAMP platform. 

Other than that, I think Rackers (our employees) are excited about all the activities that we can do. For example, recommending an influencer to a certain Gaggle – that is something we weren’t able to do with Elevate. There are all kinds of things that we’re able to do with the program to increase outcomes even further. 

Q: How has your strategy changed with GaggleAMP?

There are over 50 different activities on GaggleAMP. This is one of the main things I have to explain to people entering the program in how it’s different from Elevate. I basically say, ‘it’s like Elevate but way better.’ 

Since I officially own this program, I had the luxury of pairing it with other internal teams to capitalize on the program as much as possible, and implementing the gamification, and I look forward to what we can do with it in 2021. 

GaggleAMP’s built-in analytics gives you the information you need to measure your program’s success. It creates streamlined reports that can be delivered into your inbox on a daily, weekly, or monthly cadence. And we are extremely happy with our relationship with GaggleAMP, and we are looking forward to more success. 

Q: What were specific outcomes you wanted to achieve with GaggleAMP?

We wanted to lift and shift the Elevate program as smoothly as possible. 

This involved rolling out the training to employees who were interested in the program, making sure we get those Rackers who were part of the Elevate program, and getting them the first seats with GaggleAMP. 

Our top priorities were to increase the social reach for the Rackspace Technology brand, increase follower count, improve click-through rates, engagement rates, and reactions across all platforms. This was an excellent way for us to share all major company news and tie everything back to our core business KPIs. It was really the perfect platform for us. 

Q: How was your onboarding experience? 

Amazing! We have an amazing customer success manager in Chad Rosh, who was an incredible asset to the launch and training portion of the program. He’s just been so incredibly responsive anytime I have a question or any of our Gaggle Managers have questions. It’s so nice to have that kind of support and know that you can just reach out. It’s definitely a great customer support team.

Our Rackers were super quick to adopt the platform. They were able to do the quick and easy training. We recorded a training session with Chad that lasted about 15 minutes, so who can’t fit that into their day? 

Also, it’s given us a chance to connect with our colleagues across the organization and given us a chance to speak out about what they’re doing. That’s not always easy when you have a big company. It’s given us a chance in Marketing to connect with all different types of teams and help them with their initiatives. 

Q: If you have any advice from people switching platforms, what would you recommend? 

If you have access to your original platform as we did with Elevate, pull as much information as you can from your program because you’re going to want it when you’re transitioning. I pulled a list of all of our Members and all of the data I could out of LinkedIn Elevate because that’s going to tell you who your social rockstars are. You’re going to want to make sure they are part of your new employee advocacy program. 

Something else I would recommend would be to lean on your resources. If you’re a one-man team like myself, you’ll need to ask for some help. 

GaggleAMP helped me with my onboarding and training, and they still help me with training newcomers. Having that help from the vendor itself is incredible. 

Q: If you had to go back and do it all over again, would you do anything differently? 

Well, our hunt for a new employee advocacy tool was pretty simple. We picked out the top three vendors in the industry, did some reviews with key stakeholders, and we agreed that GaggleAMP was the obvious choice. It was a pretty straightforward decision for all of us.