Joe Rogan has managed to get himself in the news again. And once again, in a controversial way. Now, I’m a bit of a fan of his podcast, especially because he doesn’t take himself too seriously. As with most of the other controversies he’s been involved in, I think his detractors take him more seriously than he does – or than most of his audience does, including me.
But rather than wade into the controversy, I wanted to talk about one of my favorite moments on his show, and why that moment is relevant for marketing teams on the fence about employee advocacy.
Competition
In an episode from a few years ago, Rogan says that he has a positive attitude towards competition. He explains that, rather than feel jealous when he sees someone doing something more skillfully than he does it, he takes it as motivation to perform better. If someone does something more impressively than him, “that means it can be done better” than he’s doing it.
Rather than get down about this, he takes it as a sign that he can improve – whether it’s his lifts, his fighting, his comedy-routines, or even his podcast.
What Does This Have to Do with You?
One common sticking point that content marketers and social media managers have about embracing employee advocacy, or letting their employees (from outside the marketing team) write articles and craft social posts, is a worry that those employees’ content might perform better than content created in-house.
Let’s face it. We all get jealous sometimes. Even when it’s your best friend. It’s easy to feel a pang of envy when your buddy beats you in a race or a game of one-on-one basketball.
But rather than wish ill of our friends, some of us take that stab of jealousy as a motivation to improve our own performance.
It’s Okay to Feel a Little Jealous
It’s pretty natural to feel nervous about opening up content and social media to the entire company. It’s new. And, yeah, some employees might write better articles than you or post videos that go viral. But that’s okay – if you take the right lesson from it.
You can either have a healthy attitude to competition, or an unhealthy attitude. And like high-school football, attitude makes a difference in what you’ll get out of competition.
If someone on your engineering team posts a graphic that outperforms every graphic you’ve ever created, you can learn from that. You can up your content game to match your employees.
If someone on in your frontline staff masters TikTok influencing, maybe you can learn something from them. Maybe you’ll discover how to do even better in the future.
Joe Rogan has the right attitude towards competition. You can too. If you take that attitude, you’ll get the most out of employee advocacy.
Friendly Competition
The key here is the word friendly. Competition sucks when competitors try to sabotage one another and best friends stab each other in the back. It’s okay to be a little jealous. But then you have to get past that. You’ve got to turn that jealousy into fuel for your motivation.
So, try opening up your digital presence to some friendly competition. Don’t worry too much. Let your employees post cool pictures and send awesome tweets. Watch what they do well. Then try to one-up them. If you can beat their stuff, your company will do even better.
And not only will that be fun, it will be good for your company’s bottom line.
