
Focusing on Employee Advocacy and Engagement with Glenn Gaudet
with Shane Barker
In this episode, Shane Barker interviews Glenn Gaudet, CEO of GaggleAMP, about unlocking the power of employee advocacy for digital growth. Glenn explains how empowering employees to share authentic content elevates brand presence and drives engagement. He outlines the evolution of advocacy programs, the importance of clear guidelines, and training to achieve measurable results. Discover strategies to transform employee voices into a key marketing asset.


Glenn Gaudet is the Founder and CEO of GaggleAMP, a leading employee advocacy platform that helps businesses harness the power of social media. With over two decades of expertise in marketing and digital transformation, Glenn built GaggleAMP to empower employees, foster authentic engagement, and drive measurable results. Under his leadership, organizations worldwide have improved brand visibility, boosted sales pipelines, and cultivated stronger customer relationships.
Prior to GaggleAMP, Glenn held senior roles in marketing and product management at technology firms, refining his ability to innovate and implement scalable solutions. He regularly shares strategic insights through webinars, speaking engagements, and industry publications, helping executives integrate employee advocacy into broader growth strategies. His practical approach highlights collaboration, data-driven tactics, and continuous learning.
Glenn is passionate about helping businesses stay competitive in a rapidly evolving landscape. By focusing on culture, empowerment, and adaptability, he elevates teams to realize their highest potential and lasting success.
Episode Show Notes
In this episode of The Marketing Growth Podcast, host Shane Barker sits down with Glenn Gaudet, founder and CEO of GaggleAMP, to explore the transformative power of employee advocacy and engagement. Glenn shares his unique journey from his early days growing up in the Boston area and Las Vegas to becoming a pioneer in digital marketing. He explains how companies can leverage their employees’ voices to amplify their social presence and drive authentic engagement.
Glenn discusses the evolution of employee advocacy programs—from initially encouraging simple content sharing to evolving into strategic, measurable initiatives that align with overall digital marketing goals. He emphasizes that while technology plays a critical role, true success comes from the careful implementation and ongoing training of employees. By offering clear guidelines and empowering staff to express their authentic voice, organizations can build stronger brand relationships and boost their press coverage. Glenn also highlights the importance of setting realistic expectations for employee participation and continuously adjusting the program based on feedback and KPIs. His insights provide valuable guidance for marketers looking to create sustainable, engaging employee advocacy strategies that drive business growth and foster genuine connections.
Brands mentioned
- GaggleAMP
- Amp Up Your Digital Marketing

Welcome to the podcast. I’m Shane Barker, your host of Shane Barker’s Marketing Madness Podcast. In this episode, let’s dive into a conversation with Glenn Gaudet, the founder and CEO of GaggleAMP. His company helps organizations amplify their social presence by focusing on employee engagement. He’s also the host of a weekly podcast called Amp Up Your Digital Marketing. Listen to Glenn talk about how you can align your employee advocacy program with your digital marketing strategy for best results.
Well, Glenn, hey once again. Shane Barker here—so, so happy that we’re having you on the podcast today. Like I said about six months ago, I was on your podcast. Awesome time. And now we get to give back and let everybody know what you’ve got going on. So as we always start off the podcast, I wanted to talk a little bit like, where did you grow up? I know you’re currently in the Boston area, correct?

Glenn Gaudet
Yeah, I started in the Boston area. I actually grew up in a suburb just outside of Boston up until sixth grade, and then my family moved to Las Vegas, Nevada.
And it was pretty interesting because, of course, I didn’t know I had a Boston accent until I moved out of Boston.

That’s funny.

Glenn Gaudet
So I really learned that people do have accents. When I went out there, not only apparently did I have an accent that everybody wanted to hear, but I heard other people’s accents, which was really interesting.

Especially in the Vegas area, right? I mean, that’s like a melting pot—really vacation people from all over the world, right? So I know you, I walk in Vegas and you’re hearing French and Italian and this and that. It’s just kind of interesting.

Glenn Gaudet
Well, and when you go to school out there too, you’ve got this amalgamation of people who—very few people that you talk to are from Vegas originally. Even more so now, because there’s been so much growth in Vegas. Back then, at least, there were some people who you knew were there for a generation or two, but you don’t see that much anymore. But that being said, it was a really interesting place to be. I was there for sixth grade and junior high, and then we moved back to Massachusetts. That really opened up a lot for me as a kid who, you know, just grew up in the Boston area. Again, just being able to meet different people from different parts of the world—it was pretty fascinating.

Yeah, yeah, that’s pretty cool. Why did you guys move to Vegas?

Glenn Gaudet
My dad was actually an iron worker, and he ended up having a back injury, and that was pretty painful for him, and we moved to Las Vegas because it was a lot drier and humidity really had an impact on my dad’s back. And so we moved to Las Vegas, but then ultimately, I think my mom’s desire to be closer to family kind of brought us back to the East Coast.
In terms of the immediate family, I have an older sister, and both my mom and dad have passed. But it was the core unit of four of us.

Gotcha, gotcha, gotcha. And so what about any interesting facts that you’re like with growing up? Was there anything that you’re like, “A lot of people didn’t know this,” or “didn’t know that you,” you know, “had a brother and he ended up missing in Vegas,” or not that he did. I mean, I’m saying that happened. I’m, you know, because I’m not judging—because you’re in Vegas, and that’s where the mobs were located for a long period of time.
But I’m just saying—like, is there any fun facts like that? Anything fun, not that your brother, you know, that maybe he’s missing—but anything fun like that that we need to know?

Glenn Gaudet
Well, my dad’s dad—my grandfather—was badge number one in Malden, Massachusetts. Wow. So he was on the force long enough where your badge number indicated your seniority. It was really interesting. So my grandfather—there’s a story—he actually fired his weapon once his entire career.
So this was in Malden. Apparently, somebody had robbed a bank, and my grandfather was on foot chasing this guy down an alley. He took out his weapon, fired once, and the guy stopped—so he didn’t actually shoot the guy. I’m not sure if he shot it in the air, shot it in the ground—yeah? Either one of them, you start to wonder. But yeah, whoever it was, the culprit stopped, and my grandfather was able to arrest him and secure the money.

That is awesome. So that’s the kind of story I’m talking about. Like, you never know what people are going to say. That’s kind of awesome. So he was number one—yeah, badge number one. One shot, and that’s it. Got the whole place to stop and got the money back. I mean, that’s literally—literally—the good guy.

Glenn Gaudet
Yeah, you know. And I often wonder, like, because if you think about at least what you see in the media, so much now about police and riots and, you know, the SWAT folks coming in and everything… What’d be interesting to know is—how many times does the average police officer actually fire their weapon these days?

You know, it’s so funny. Not to get into the politics of that, but I would never be a police officer these days. It would be a challenge. I mean, it’s just—everything. Not to get into the political side of that, but man, it’s just such a hard career. You know, it’s such a hard, hard thing. You hear “protect the public,” and there are just a lot of moving pieces to it. We’re not all trained and ready for that situation when it happens, and whether that’s good or bad, you know, it affects lives. It’s a crazy deal. We don’t need to go down that path—that’s probably a whole other podcast.
But did you actually go to school in Vegas, or did you go to school in Boston when you went—did you go to college?

Glenn Gaudet
So college—I went to undergrad at Babson College, and that’s in Massachusetts. Yeah. But I did move around during my school years. So I did kindergarten through the first part of sixth grade in Malden, where my grandfather was a police officer. Then I did junior high and part of sixth grade in Las Vegas, and then ended up moving back to Massachusetts, where I spent my high school years.

Ah, nice. Closer to family and everything. And Babson was obviously in Boston. Boston has a ton of colleges. I always think—I’ve talked about this in the past—guests say the amount of colleges per square foot is insane. It’s like there’s a university every three inches or something. It’s wild. There’s a lot, but they’re all solid. I remember I went out there for a tour and was like, “God, that’s crazy,” hearing how many universities are out there.

Glenn Gaudet
I went to grad school too. I went to grad school down at Johns Hopkins, which is in the Baltimore–Washington, DC area.

Yeah, so I was at a speaking event out there, and it was right next to one of the Johns Hopkins campuses. I can’t remember if it was in Baltimore, but that’s awesome. So cool. And then what did you get your degree in?

Glenn Gaudet
My undergrad was in business—basically everyone who went to Babson got a BS in business management, right? Nice. And then I went to grad school for information and telecommunication systems, so I can tell you how the phone system works. But since I graduated, so…

That’s crazy. I’ve said this before, and I’m like, “Oh, chance we graduate and all this fun stuff.” And I’m like, I use maybe 1% of what I learned. Everything I’ve learned, you know? Employee advocacy wasn’t something that was even talked about—it wasn’t even on the radar, right? So that’s why I’m kind of intrigued about it. Like, how did you—what was your first job out of college?
I mean, obviously, you were looking at the telecom side of things, and I’m assuming this was probably around the time I graduated, not super recent. A few years ago, give or take 10, 15… maybe 20. So yeah, what were your seasons?

Glenn Gaudet
No, I’ve been around the block many times at this point. But what really intrigued me when I graduated from undergrad—I didn’t go directly to grad school—I knew I wanted to travel a bit because I had some experience with that in high school and during my time in Las Vegas. And I just couldn’t imagine being stuck behind a desk, not getting out and seeing the world. I thought, wouldn’t it be cool if I could find a job where someone paid me to get on a plane and travel?
So I ended up finding a position at a company called World Expo, which was a division of IDG. Not sure if you remember International Data Group.

That sounds really familiar to me.

Glenn Gaudet
Yeah, they were the publisher of Computer World, PC World, a lot of tech publications. World Expo was the trade show group, and they produced a lot of high-tech trade shows.

I think I remember now—this was a long time ago. I remember a buddy of mine’s dad was a chef or something, and it was in Toronto. I want to say Toronto or maybe Vancouver. There were a bunch of them, and I think they had a lot of shows in different cities around the world.

Glenn Gaudet
Yeah, so I went in there, and my first job out of school was producing conferences and trade shows. That was wild—at 21 years old, I was producing multi-million-dollar events. That’s how I cut my teeth in the business.

That’s awesome. What’s funny is, back then, there probably weren’t a lot of events. That was kind of an anomaly at the time. Now, of course, there are way more, but back then, doing events was rare. Having that background, even without realizing how valuable it was, that’s awesome. You guys still do events now, right? I’m sure we’ll dig into that more with GaggleAMP.

Glenn Gaudet
Yeah, it was pretty natural for me to get into in-person events. You’d be surprised—back then there were actually a lot of events, especially in the high-tech sector. We were doing events for telecommunications; they owned Macworld too. Beyond that, almost every trade industry had some kind of event or trade association putting on huge shows.
I don’t know if you recall Comdex. It was the precursor. The big Vegas event. Back then, it was the largest computer event in the world, held in Las Vegas. You might know the name Shelly Adelson—he’s known now for politics, but he got his start with Comdex. He created that event, and it made so much money he ended up buying one of the hotels where the event was held—the Sands.

Jeez, that’s crazy.

Glenn Gaudet
There’s this whole history around, it’s a really fascinating world of events.

Yeah, so how did all that transition into what you’re doing now with Gaggle? I’m always curious about the journey—how this led to that, then that led to this. I’d love to hear the story.

Glenn Gaudet
That might take a while, but I’ll try to keep it short. After those events, I became really intrigued by the high-tech vendors at our shows. I was genuinely interested in the tech, and that led me down the path of not doing events anymore, but instead marketing for software.

For the cool stuff that you found.

Glenn Gaudet
Yes, it really was. It’s still interesting to me today, but the path from there was a series of different jobs—mostly in business development and marketing—where everything led to me becoming a Chief Marketing Officer. I was in a job interview for another CMO position, about nine years ago, and I was literally in the CEO’s corner office. We were talking about social media, and he asked, “What do we do about social media?”
This company had almost no presence, and they were competing against a much bigger company—Cisco. So I asked him, “How could we get you to rise above the noise?” I asked, “How many employees do you have?” He said, “About 1,000.” I said, “What if we got these 1,000 employees to help with digital marketing—share messages, get engaged?”
He said, “That’s a good idea.” So I went home that night and started looking for a product that could do this.

Okay, we got the idea for the software.

Glenn Gaudet
Yeah. And there was no product. So I had a decision to make. I didn’t think it was rocket science, just this simple idea—but apparently, nobody had built a product for it. So instead of waiting for someone else to do it, I started the company.

That’s awesome. Such a good idea—I love that you didn’t take the job. That’s so funny. It’s so simplistic, right? Because you think, someone must’ve already talked about this or done this. But even now, nine years later, there’s still so much education needed around employee advocacy.
A lot of companies are still scared: “What does this mean? How do we do it? How do we do it right?” And what happens if an employee says something controversial—how do you manage that?
But the amazing part is that you’re talking to someone and saying, “You’ve got 1,000 people working for you—those are your advocates. That’s a huge voice.” If companies start talking about what they value and what’s really happening, there’s tremendous value in that. Even nine years ago, that was ahead of its time. And even today, people are still disconnected from the concept.
So I want to talk a little about that—what you’ve built at Gaggle over the past nine years, and then dive into employee advocacy: how you do it the right way, and what some of the pitfalls are.

Glenn Gaudet
Yeah, it’s interesting—we’ve learned a lot over these nine years. We’ve seen what works and what doesn’t, and we’ve built that into our technology. But just as important is what we’ve done within our customer success group: helping clients with best practices.
There’s stuff to avoid. Here’s what to do, here’s what not to do. And I think you’ve seen this too—companies assume software alone solves the problem. But it never does. It’s about the implementation. You can’t just throw tech at it and expect results.
There’s a program, a process, a strategy that goes with this. If you don’t understand that, it doesn’t matter what tool you buy.

So you have to put in work. Hold on, I gotta write this down—so you’re telling me you don’t just buy the software and it does everything for you? This is good. Thank God I’m sitting down. It’s funny—I’m being facetious—but a lot of people believe that, right? They think it’s like, “I bought the treadmill, now I’m going to lose weight.”
But it really comes down to implementation. There’s work involved. The software is just the vehicle that helps you move things forward, keeps things running, and helps track what’s going on. But you still have to do the work.
And that’s what’s interesting. Anything that’s worth doing takes effort. You know, a seven-second AB test isn’t going to land you a job faster. You still have to put in the effort. That’s what you’re getting at, right?

Glenn Gaudet
Totally. That’s exactly it. Especially with this. If someone thinks they can just buy a piece of tech—hardware or software—and be done, they’re mistaken. You can’t just “set it and forget it.”
I’d say focus less on the “forget it” part, because that’s not how you achieve results. The tech should align with your KPIs and strategy, not the other way around. Too many people think buying software solves the problem, and they try to make an out-of-the-box solution fit. But every company is different, and that rarely works.

Exactly. Every strategy is different. There are so many variables. If it were a one-size-fits-all, we’d build one software product for 10,000 companies and call it a day.
The idea is that you get the software as a base, but then it’s customizable. You’ve got the out-of-the-box version, but it also needs to be adapted for your specific needs. That’s how it’s going to work for most companies. It should evolve based on feedback and how companies are using it. That’s why the different features are built out—to make sure it works for each unique business.

Glenn Gaudet
Right. One of the things I learned early on while building the company was that people are going to need help, even if we build amazing software—and we have. But software alone isn’t enough. People need to understand the strategy behind it.
Just because the software is easy to use doesn’t mean users understand what employee advocacy really is. That’s where our customer success team comes in. We work closely with clients to help them understand best practices. Yes, we’re providing software, but our goal is to help you build a program that gets the results you’re after.

And that’s the key—sustainability. I think a lot of software companies underestimate how important onboarding is. People think it’s easy to use software, but you don’t know the background of the users. You don’t know how tech-savvy they are, or what kind of support system they have.
That white-glove onboarding, holding their hand at the start—that’s critical. If you can guide them to the point where they can’t live without your software, you’ve won. But it takes time. First, they need to understand it, then implement it, then actually see the results.
Once they hit that moment and get value from it, they’re not going anywhere. But that training early on? That’s what makes all the difference.

Glenn Gaudet
Exactly. And it’s not just about training end users. It’s also about educating the marketing folks who manage the whole program. One thing we really want people to understand from the beginning is this: your employee advocacy program should evolve.
What you do on day 1 won’t be what you do on day 30, or day 60, or six months from now. It should constantly adapt. You’ll be learning not just from the platform, but from the people using it. Their feedback is essential.
That’s how you fine-tune the program—by asking, “What should I do more of? What should I stop doing?” That ongoing evolution is something to get excited about.

Right? I mean, even though people don’t like change, it’s important to be able to go and understand what people are saying—and be able to implement that. If you’re not listening, if you’re not willing to say, “Listen, we understand that things are going to change,” then what are you doing, right? You’re staying stagnant. So when we talk about employee advocacy, like—give me a definition. What do you define as employee advocacy?

Glenn Gaudet
Really good question. It kind of depends on where you’re coming from. A person in HR might think of employee advocacy as one thing, while a marketing person might see it differently. So if you break it down, let’s talk about advocacy—what does that mean? You’re advocating on behalf of someone or something. In employee advocacy, we’re looking for employees to help advocate for the company. Word-of-mouth is going to happen naturally. What’s less natural is how employees advocate digitally. So it’s about equipping them with the right tools and content so they can advocate for the company in that digital space.

Gotcha. So that would be almost like the education side of it—teaching them how to put out content, what types of content to create, and showing examples. Is that what you’re talking about?

Glenn Gaudet
And so I’ll give you an example. I think what a lot of people think about is, “Let me get a couple thousand employees to retweet something.” Okay, well, that’s fine. That’s valid to some degree. That’s certainly one option. But there are other things—like on our platform, you can ask your employees to answer a question, and their answer becomes the tweet. What you’re doing is empowering your employees with an authentic voice, but you’re also giving them some guardrails. You might bake in a hashtag so they don’t have to figure that out. You might even include an image. But the unique language they provide is theirs. So now, all of a sudden, you’re getting real, authentic conversations. And what does that do? That fuels engagement. And what does engagement lead to? Engagement leads to relationships. So if your employees are building more relationships with your target market—your customers—that’s a good thing.

Yeah, for sure. And if we talk about this, what’s the biggest risk when you’re a big company? I always think, “Oh, but what if Johnny goes off the rails and says something crazy?” And I know that doesn’t happen often, but it’s always the crazy stuff that makes the headlines. So obviously, when you have software, you’ve got guardrails in place. You’ve got systems, you’re saying, “Hey, here’s what we allow, here’s what we don’t.” So what’s the system for that? How does your software protect against that?

Glenn Gaudet
Let me ask you this—are you going to stop Johnny from going off the rails if you don’t have software?

So you’ve got to get rid of Johnny. Johnny’s a problem. We’ve got to fire Johnny. That’s all you had to say. I’m going to fire Johnny today. I was just waiting for the green light. I kept bringing him up, and now we’re here—Johnny, if you’re hearing this, you’re fired. Sorry, man. Makes sense. Makes total sense. Software’s not gonna save that.

Glenn Gaudet
Look, at the end of the day, particularly if you’re talking about social networks like, you know, it’s Johnny’s Twitter account, Johnny’s LinkedIn account. It’s Johnny’s Facebook. You know, whatever social network they use, it doesn’t belong to the company. It belongs to Johnny. So whether you’re making quality suggestions to Johnny or not, Johnny can do whatever the heck Johnny wants. Gotcha. Makes sense, right?
So the idea of, well, if we give them positive things to do, that may actually incent them to do something negative—I think that’s the wrong way to look at this. Yeah, I think instead you should look at it like, if we give them no guardrails at all, the incidents of people going off the reservation, if you will, are probably more likely to happen because they don’t know the positive stuff they can do.

Gotcha. So it’s about giving the examples. It’s letting them really say. It’s educating—because some people don’t know what to put, right? That’s really, I think, the biggest thing. It’s like, “What do I put out there?” Like, I don’t know what to do.
Like, I remember when I first joined Twitter, which is, I don’t know how many years ago, but I remember thinking, “What am I gonna say?” Like, we’re like, “Oh hey, I’m using the restroom. This is awesome.” Like, nobody cares. I’m in the kitchen. I’m making a sandwich. You’re like, “Ooh, shades of making a sandwich.” Like, nobody cares about that, you know?
And now, of course, I know, because I’ve been doing it for so long. But I remember in the beginning, it was very like… because I told my brother—I remember I had the conversation with my brother, and he was in San Francisco—and I said, “Hey, you’re using Twitter. Like, what do you use it for?” Because I don’t really like… I don’t, you know, nobody cares what I’m doing. I don’t think people like what I like. I’ve got like, one follower. It’s like, mom. Like, I’ll just call her and tell her what I’m doing. I don’t, you know. I don’t really know.
And then my brother was like, “Well, I’ll use it,” because he was in production. And he’s like, “Why? You know, using it so I can put some stuff out there, and some of my past clients will see it. They’ll be reminded of the work that I do.”
And there’s just a lot of positive things. And after I learned that from that, that was mind you, because I talked to my brother, and there’s some education there that happened. And then after that, I was like, “Okay, this makes sense. I’m just going to kind of, you know, talk about some marketing things and things I’ve got going on with my clients.” And, you know, not always about me, but it just helped put a strategy together after that.
But there was that initial push of like, I don’t know if I really want to do this Twitter thing or who cares, right? And then it’s like, now, some are a main platform for me, and I have a good audience, and we built that up, and things are good.
But yeah, you know, it’s that first step, I think, is always the hardest part.

Glenn Gaudet
So if you think of it from this perspective, if you’re working at a company, chances are at this point, you know, your company probably has some sort of a social media policy, right? It might be a paragraph in the handbook, or it might be a multi-page thing, depending on what it is.
If you’re a marketing person listening to this podcast, what I would do is go to that social media policy and look at it. And you know, eight times out of ten, you’re going to see that it’s going to be: don’t do this, don’t do this, don’t do this, don’t do this, don’t do this.
Rather, they can go, “Here’s some examples of what would be good for you to do.” Yeah. So it’s all about the negative versus again, giving them some positive things that they can do.
And by the way, giving them things that they can do is really hard to do in one paragraph. It’s really hard to do in a couple of pages. And so that’s the value of using a solution like GaggleAMP—because you’re able to give them packaged opportunities to do things on a regular basis.

Yeah, I think that’s such a key. It’s funny when the policies that you say—whether it’s a paragraph or a few pages—it’s about what not to do, instead of talking about what to do, what you can do right.
Like, let’s empower them. Let’s educate them and empower them. And I think that’s the hardest part. It’s like, well, we just tell them, “Don’t do this, don’t do this, don’t do this.”
Okay, that’s awesome. But then if you really want me to do something, it becomes scary, right?
Like, now I don’t want to try because I’m scared. I’m not going to write the right thing. You give me an example, then I can maybe curate something—or if there’s something that’s already kind of put together, I can customize a little bit. Great. That makes sense, right?
We try to take the guessing work out of it so that you’re not sending something out and going, “Man, I sure hope HR is okay with this,” right?
I mean, I don’t know if this is going to be approved or not. Well, great if you’re putting it out there and you have some—at least some guidelines—I think that’s the key to this whole thing.
It’s less about… I think that was kind of an “aha” moment for me. Like, less about what you can’t do and more about what you can do.

Glenn Gaudet
Well, it’s also, if you think about the evolution of this over the years. You know, when we started, a lot of companies were still putting their heads in the sand, and they were saying like, “No, our policy is, don’t say anything, don’t do anything.”
There’s three people in the company that can actually talk to the outside world about the company, right? I mean, think about that, right? There’s people with press credentials.
And you know, the only people who could talk to anyone would be that. Well, hey, the world’s a different place now.
Now, everybody’s talking to everybody. So you can either accept that and empower it, or you can keep your head buried in the sand and let your entire organization basically have all of those conversations and engagements.

Yeah. And I think that’s the key thing. Like, yeah, maybe if your organization doesn’t change, then your competitors are going to, right? I mean, you have to. It’s like, it’s evolving times, right? Yeah. I mean, with platforms and everything else, it’s like, you know, I think probably nine years ago, people could say that “I’m not too worried about it, it’s not that big of a deal.”
Like, when you know what you’re coming up with, I think there’s some value—but whatever.
And now it’s like, there are so many platforms. So many of this and so many of that—it’s like, if you don’t get control of it, right? If you don’t say, “Hey, listen, this is what you can do,” because it’s going to happen no matter what, more likely, right?
I mean, it’s like people are already out there talking, but if you can give them some guidelines on how to talk about things, I think that’s a part. It becomes scary for people though, because like we have, but then they’re going to have a voice.
Well, they already have a voice, right?
Yeah, it’s like, that’s not going away, but it’s on the education side.
So who would choose—when we talk about, like, what are the keys to having a successful [employee advocacy program]… I mean, and we kind of talked about it a little bit, but is there anything we’re missing? That we haven’t talked about yet in regards to, like, having a successful employee advocacy program?
Is there, like, some pillars that you look at and say, “These are the five things we focus on,” or is there anything that we’ve missed?

Glenn Gaudet
Well, I think one of the things you have to do is level-set your expectations, right? And this is an interesting one.
So when you send an email out to everyone in the company, how many people actually open that email at my company?

I think we’re—I think one. I think my assistant is one that opens it because he knows I’m watching him.
But yeah, it’s probably—I mean, it’s probably pretty low. I would—let me take that back. Depends on if we have meat. I don’t know. I don’t know. That’s a great question. I’ll have to look into that when I get off this. I mean, I don’t know.

Glenn Gaudet
That’s a good question. So in general, you know, whether you have 100 people in your company or tens of thousands of people in your company, if you send out an email, you’re gonna have some small percentage of them actually open the email. Another small percentage of that group might take some action—just like your regular email, right? You expect email to have kind of a low open rate and then some.
So don’t set your expectations that everyone in the company is going to do everything that you’re asking from them, from an employee advocacy solution. So if your expectation is that, day one, you’re going to have all 1,000 people in your company not only on the platform but also doing everything you expect them to do—you’re setting yourself up for disappointment.
Yeah, right, which isn’t to say you shouldn’t invite all 1,000 people, but you also need to give yourself—and set the expectation correctly to other people who are involved in this—that you’re gonna build this over a period of time. It’s not gonna happen overnight, right?

And that’s with anything. I mean, that’s not just with employee advocacy. I mean, that’s with anything. Like, you’re not gonna—I’m not gonna go put together a PPC campaign and then we’re gonna go count the millions of dollars.
Millions of dollars that come in from SEO or anything that involves a strategy—guess what? It’s gonna take time, right? Because you’re gonna tweet stuff, and things are gonna happen. It’s not an overnight thing.
So just because you get 500 people to retweet something doesn’t mean that you guys are gonna be on, you know, the S&P 500, right?
I mean, it’s like—the idea is, it takes time, right? And then people are going to be—some people are going to be comfortable, some people learn, and then people become more comfortable. And then they’ll get to a point where people are going to start educating other people. Like, “Oh, I’ve sent some stuff out, and this is how I do it.”
And then it’s, “This is where you can find it.” And okay, now I feel more comfortable with that. And you can give accolades or bonuses or whatever it is—like, you know, getting people involved, whether it’s gamification or something like that—to where people become more comfortable.
A lot of people aren’t going to do it just because they don’t feel comfortable, right?
You know, even with the education, you’ve just got to find the people that are out there saying some stuff, and now you can just help tailor that message for them so they feel comfortable in their voice—and so they’re still putting that content out.
So I get it. I mean, it just takes time—like anything.

Glenn Gaudet
And as a marketer, you’re going to have different strategies. You’re going to be tying your employee advocacy strategy to the overall digital marketing and overall company strategy, right? And so you’re going to be able to break things down.
So let me give you an example. You might have three or four people in your company that are subject matter experts in a particular industry, right? You’re probably not the entire company, right, as much as we’d like to think.
So it’s probably not the entire company that really just knows the stuff inside. Now what you want to do is focus on those three or four people and provide them some opportunities to jump into a conversation.
Maybe it’s a blog post you want them to comment on. Maybe it’s a LinkedIn post. Maybe it’s something you’ve been listening to from the marketing perspective, and you’ve seen influencers outside the company having that discussion. Let’s get our subject matter experts into that conversation.
So yeah, for sure—get those people, point them in that direction. And then what do you do? You get the masses to amplify the conversation, right?

Makes total sense. Yeah. I mean, it’s like, get the people in there that you don’t—you know—that know how to answer and do the things, and then have everybody else talk about it, or retweet it, or put it out there, like it, or whatever it may be. That’s right. That’s right. Interesting.
Well, I love that, because not everybody’s going to want to respond, and not everybody should respond, right? I mean, so I think it’s a situation of like, this is kind of the strategy. This is how we’re going to go about it. And let’s see what happens.
And each platform is going to be different. And, you know, sometimes you have stuff that will take off virally because of something, and there’s a lot of things.
And how do you—when you think about this—so let’s say, how do you look at the ROI of this?
So in other words, if I’m a company and saying, Hey, our strategy is that, you know, Shane’s going to respond to anything that’s on LinkedIn, that there’s a conversation happening over there. Shane responds. People like it. People do this, and whatever they do.
How do we look at, like, the ROI of that, right? So I go, okay, like, the social media is always, for a long time, has been like, well, what’s the ROI of social media?
Like, how do I quantify this, right? If you don’t say, Hey, this is bringing in this kind of, maybe sales, maybe attributes back to sales, or whatever this is.
But how do you—how do you look at that in regards to employee advocacy from a social media standpoint?

Glenn Gaudet
Well, I think it depends on what you’re trying to accomplish, right? You know, some companies out there want to have a tremendous impact on their share of voice. Other companies want to have a lead generation component to this, like—how many leads can we drive? How many links can we get out there that’ll drive more traffic to us? What’s the reach look like? What’s the engagement look like?
So it really depends on what you’re trying to do. And typically, if you’re doing this, you’re aligning it to the overall KPIs of your digital marketing efforts, right?
So in one bucket, you might have a paid world, right? You have certain KPIs around the paid activities. You should have certain KPIs around your employee advocacy, but they should all be in alignment with trying to drive the overall goals of the digital marketing effort—in the goals, ultimately, of the company.

That makes sense. Total sense. You’re really kind of building it backwards—like, what are your goals? What are you looking to do? And then, how are we going to accomplish that?
That’s right. That’s right. I mean, that makes… and that’s, once again, with any strategy. That’s what’s important.
Employee advocacy is no different than—well, I mean, it’s different than SEO—but in the sense that it’s like, Hey, you’re building a strategy, and you’re going to tweak it as you go. You kind of have to build it backwards.
Like, what’s our goal? What are we looking to do? Are we trying to generate, you know, a million dollars in sales?
Well, that’s probably not going to happen in a month, or two, or three—or even five months. But maybe over time.
So how do we measure that? What’s the metric? How do we look at that?
I love that. It’s like anything—you set goals, then build it backwards and say, Okay, how do we get to that point?
So if we want to be here in a year and generate $10,000 more in revenue—or whatever that number is—then we look at that campaign, we tweak it as we go, until we reach a point where it becomes natural for people to share content or put it out there.
And now the company understands how to respond, how to lead, how to guide others. That’s really the goal.

Glenn Gaudet
And I know I mentioned this before, but I think one of the things we do really well is work with our customers.
Our customer success team becomes the strategist with the customer, because what they’re doing is they’re showing them:
“Okay, well, here’s how you’re doing compared to other companies doing similar things. Where are you in that? What could you be doing more of? Have you tried this or that, given what you want to accomplish?”
So we can take a look at what you’re doing and where you’re trying to go, and give you a path to get there—rather than you trying to figure it out on your own. Because for a lot of people, there’s a lot of innovation that comes through.
And not just from a technology point of view, but through using the technology the right way.
Yeah? And I think that’s really important.

Yeah, the implementation—I think it’s awesome that you guys have that kind of success team. Because it’s just so important.
People go in like, “I don’t even know where to start.”
I know a little bit about it. I’ve read some blog posts. But, you know, once they’ve got goals and KPIs and some idea of ROI, your team can step in and help them build it out. Like, “This is where we should start.”
I think that’s one of the biggest hurdles. People go, “Okay, I’ve heard about this, but I don’t really know what to do.”
So here’s a question for you: What’s one of the biggest myths around employee advocacy that we need to debunk?
I think a lot of people think, “Oh, we’ll just get the software, start a strategy, and in a few weeks we’ll have everybody retweeting everything. We’ll go viral in a week or two.”
So what is it that people most often get wrong? What’s the thing companies typically assume—like success equals faster sales, or whatever—and you’re like, “That’s not really it.”
What’s something in that area people really need to rethink?

Glenn Gaudet
Well, I’m going to answer this a little more broadly. If you’re thinking in a binary way about your employee advocacy program, you’re probably setting yourself up for failure.
Let me give you an example. I think all my employees are going to do everything I want—very binary. Like, they either do it or they don’t. But the reality is, there are really three different groups of employees within your company.
On one end of the spectrum, you’ve got the people who are already super active on social. No matter what you do, they’re going to do their own thing anyway. They’re already there. They might even have their own listening tools. They’re just inspired, and that’s what they do.
On the other end of the spectrum, you’ve got people who—no matter what you do, no matter how easy you make it—they’re just not going to do anything. It’s just not their thing. And that’s okay too.
But the majority of your employees are in that middle bucket, right? If maybe 5–10% are at one end, and 5–10% at the other end, you’ve got 80–90% in the middle.
These are the folks that, if you just make it easy for them and take the fear out of it by giving them some guardrails—those are the people where you get your impact. Because you get so many of them to participate.
So don’t think of this as a binary scenario where it’s either all or none. Not everyone’s going to do it, and not everyone’s going to not do it. That’s not how this works. These are your employees. They’re all individuals. And what you’re trying to do is make it super easy and, frankly, fun—for them to participate.

And I think that really is the key. I mean, it is. It’s really the education, right? Getting them to the point where they feel comfortable putting content out there.
And I think, like everything, it’s foundational—once they become more uncomfortable, they get more confident. Then there’s going to be a point where they’re just off to the races.
But I think that initial moment—knowing, “If I put this out, the company’s going to be okay with it,” and just having those parameters—is so big.
We’ve said this before, but I think the most important thing is giving them the reins and saying, “Hey, here are the guardrails. Go do your thing. Go do what you feel comfortable doing.”
And again, that’s what I’m trying to think of—except there are a few companies I have in mind, but I wanted your opinion.
Are there any companies you’d say are really crushing it with employee advocacy? I know there’s something coming to mind for me, but I want your take.
Are there any companies that really get it—maybe using your platform, or maybe not even using your platform?

Glenn Gaudet
Anybody ever think of—well, I think one of the awesome use cases that comes up, and most people don’t think about, is leveraging an employee advocacy program to really impact your press.
So a company you might have heard of, Carbon Black—if you go to our website, gaggleamp.com, go to our case study section, you’ll see this case study. It’s really powerful.
What they did was, they actually identified a couple of places for them to talk to the press. So they got on—I believe it was CNN—and started talking about the impact of security.
Once they got that out there, they had their employees amplify the message. The reporters on CNN who had talked to their employees (who were subject matter experts) suddenly saw this huge uplift of social media activity coming from employees.
And what do the reporters want? More of that. So what do they do? They ask Carbon Black to come back on.
So really, it’s a powerful combination—leveraging your subject matter experts, and also using the majority of your employees to uplift that conversation.

Yeah, and I think that’s an awesome use case, because what you’re thinking about is, like, “Hey, we’re gonna have great press, great content, some stuff that’s coming out,” and now we’re literally pushing that out and amplifying it, right?
And how do you do that successfully? In that situation, it doesn’t take an employee going out and writing content or trying to get it approved—which can feel like a lot. You can just share it with your audience. Like it, retweet it, whatever.
That’s interesting because I think it’s way easier to get buy-in on that versus getting someone to write original content. There are levels.
We talked about this with social media. Out of 100 people, there’s like 1% that will comment, 9% that might look (I forget the exact numbers), but it’s that kind of thing.
Some people feel comfortable with it, some don’t. But I think it’s an easy win when you can get more people used to saying, “Hey, can you help amplify this if it makes sense?”
Especially if they’re proud of what the company is doing. And from a PR standpoint, if someone’s working at the company and they love it, it’s great to show off like, “Hey, we did this for Christmas,” or “we helped with this cause.”
There’s always something good to share. So I think employees should be excited about telling the world what the company’s doing—especially when it comes to PR. There’s always good stuff happening online.

Glenn Gaudet
Yeah, and I think one of the things you want to remember is—at least on our platform—every employee is given the option, right? So they can either participate and do the activity we’re asking them to do, or hit the button that says, “No, thanks.”
So that’s what you want to do—you want to make it approachable without forcing them. Yeah, you want to make it okay for them to do the things they’re comfortable with, and okay for them to say, “You know, that’s outside my comfort zone.”
And then you learn from that—what things are within their comfort zone and what’s not.

And I think that’s important, right? Because the thing is, in theory, we know our audiences, right? And we don’t want to be putting out something—I’m gonna say political, just as an example—just so we can say yes or no to it.
And I look at it and go, “That doesn’t really fit with what I do,” right? I wouldn’t recommend sending out too much political stuff anyway, but if they do, then I think that’s the value of it.
It’s like, “Hey, this resonates with me, and it’s something I would want to share.” You know what? If it doesn’t resonate with me or my audience, then it’s not really something I should be sharing—and that should be okay.
That should be absolutely okay. Just like it’s okay for someone to want to share, it should be okay for someone not to share.
If you’re forcing people into being an advocate and they don’t want to be, that’s a very uncomfortable situation. That’s where tension happens, and that’s not something you necessarily need.
What you want to find is the group of people who are willing to share content—and then figure out what kind of content they’re sharing. Then give them more of that.

Glenn Gaudet
Yeah, if you think about it, that ties back to what I said before—this is the evolution of your program.
You’re going to be learning from folks about what they’re comfortable doing and what they’re uncomfortable doing. And so obviously, you want to do more of the stuff that they want.
Because if you think about it, your customers are your customers, but in an employee advocacy program, it’s your employees who are your customers.
In this case, yeah, you’ve got to remember: the things the employee wants to say—that’s the voice of the company. You’ve got to put it in the context of what they want to do, not just what you want them to do.

Which is important. I think that’s an important factor. Because, yeah, you as a brand—or, you know, as a company—you want to say, “Hey, it should be said this way.” But does that sound like it’s coming from an employee, right? Is it too much? PR? Too much to this.
It’s like you want them to still be able to take that message and say it in their own voice, which is important. I think it empowers them.

Glenn Gaudet
Yeah, look, I’m not going to say that there’s never a situation where you want people to say the same thing, right? But if that is your only approach to this, that’s going to be short-lived.
And so you want a mechanism to actually kind of get them to put things into their own voice. And again, in the beginning, you know, people may or may not participate because they’re uncomfortable with it, but over time, when you give them the baby steps—when you give them the guardrails—you’re going to see more and more people, and you’re going to see the train start to get some speed.

Yeah, which is the value of it, right? I mean, once again, like I said, it’s like anything. It’s not going to once it starts going, you’re like, “This is the reason why we invested in it,” right?
So what do you see is, like—you know, I mean, obviously with social media and platforms and everything constantly changing—where do you see this evolving? In the next few years, you’re gonna see anything? Any trends in anything? Any trends, anything that you guys have seen, obviously, beyond this nine plus years, right? Tell us what the future holds.

Glenn Gaudet
Yeah, well, let me give you a little bit of background, because we’ve seen the evolution of this over nine years, right? So when we started, nobody was really doing anything, right? So that’s where it started—with nothing.
And then it was all about, “Okay, let’s get everybody to share some content.” Okay, great. So that becomes like the ante to get in. You gotta be able to share some content. That’s cool.
The next big thing was engagements. How do we get people to be part of more engagements—whether that be liking things or commenting on things—really stepping up above just content and actually driving engagement? Yeah.
So where we see this going now in 2020 is really the employee as a content generator themselves. So now you’re starting to get into the world of crowdsourcing content. So it’s not just about marketing, doing all that all the time, but now it’s also about the employees being able to contribute content to marketing, and frankly, to the rest of the company.

Which is awesome, right? I mean, if you have people inside the organization that can provide that kind of stuff—because you really, you know, I’m a content producer, and then with podcasts and video and writing and all this—I mean, I feel like I can’t produce enough content, right?
So if I had other people that are willing to contribute and add valuable content to the company, I mean, that saves marketing dollars too, right? Where I have to hire somebody to do this. I mean, there’s some value there.
If you find somebody who’s really good at writing or that really understands the company’s view, and you can add some whether to the blog or interview them or whatever that may be—like I said, I don’t think you can produce enough content.
I think companies need to look at it that way. It’s like, how do we use our inner resources to be able to produce great content? I think that’s awesome.

Glenn Gaudet
And it’s not just about content that’s really targeted for the outside world, but it’s also content for within the company. So let me give an example.
A lot of times, you don’t necessarily have marketing folks out at maybe regional events or trade shows or whatever—if you don’t have a booth there—but you have your salespeople there.
Well, wouldn’t it be great if the salespeople could snap a picture of a competitor’s booth so that marketing now can see that, or the messaging, or things like that? So this isn’t really targeted for the outside world, but you might also have an opportunity where you have a salesperson out there.
Maybe they’re having a lunch or dinner, or they met a customer at an event. Maybe they do a selfie with them. Maybe they actually get them on video and do a little mini case study.
So there’s, you know, if you think about all the opportunities there are for content, and you think about where that content can be used and leveraged, that opens up a whole new world.
So I don’t want people to think about content just for the outside world. I want them to think about content that first is sourced internally to other employees, and then some subset of that may be good for the outside world.

Yeah, I love that. I love that. That’s it. It’s in the practice of producing the content, and then maybe that goes past the internal parts of the company.
But at least, I think that’s awesome. I think the example of a competitor or something at an exhibit or somewhere in a show that you can see, “Hey, this. What they’re doing,” and empowers them to be like, “Hey, be a part of this whole thing that they’re not really a part of,” right?
You’re not—I’m not a part of marketing. But I think this could help us, because now you’re kind of merging those worlds where marketing and sales are always looking for a way to merge and become better with each other, right?
I think that’s a good thing, or it should be.

Glenn Gaudet
It could be one of your subject matter experts that they don’t want to get into a conversation in the outside world, but they want to help educate the folks internally. Here’s why our product is really good in this situation, right? I love it.
So again, when you start thinking in terms of that, you start realizing how many opportunities there are for employees themselves to contribute thoughts and content. And it comes in many forms.

And I think the other thing that’s interesting too is that once you see another salesperson producing some kind of content, that also helps me feel more comfortable producing content, right?
Because now it becomes this thing of like, “Hey, this is kind of cool. I never thought about that.” I mean, even you just saying that, I was like, “Well, I never thought about that angle.”
And so now I would feel more comfortable going to a show and sending this picture when I would never do that before. But John had done it at another trade show that got that was really awesome, that we were able to see that as a team. Yeah, so cool. I like that.
I like that—how that kind of evolves and, once again, it empowers people. I think it really comes down to empowerment and people feeling comfortable with being able to do that.
Yeah, so with—and I’m going to ask you, this is more of like, as an individual, maybe not as the company as much—but potentially, like, what are three apps or softwares that you use that, like, I mean, and it can be, obviously, we have your software for employee advocacy, but like, I’m just trying to think of like, because you, you seem like a tech guy, obviously, right? You’ve been around for a little bit using some tech stuff, right?
Software. So are there any softwares, anything that you really enjoy? Like, give us three. I mean, there might be more than three. Is there anything that you can’t live without?

Glenn Gaudet
From a personal point of view, from a business point of view, because I’ve got kind of, I like…

Okay, let’s do, let’s do personal and we’ll jump into business.

Glenn Gaudet
Okay, so personally, there’s a weather app that I use called Dark Skies. Love it, especially living in New England—I’ve found it to be pretty accurate. And it’s so accurate down to the location that you’re at, it actually tells you when it’s about to rain, so I get right. So I love that.
I also have a dog at home, and I’ve got this—it’s basically like a Fitbit that you can put on the collar of your dog, and it’s called Whistle. I think it’s actually an Amazon company, and I think Amazon bought them, and so it’s really cool. It tracks the amount of activity that the dog is doing, and also has a GPS component, so it’ll tell you where the dog is in case it gets away. I love that. Really, really cool if you’re a dog person.

Yeah, I am a dog—I’ve got two dogs at home. In fact, my wife just last night sent me pictures of these puppies from some—she’s a nurse—and somebody in the hospital is like, “Oh, I’ve got these puppies that I’m just giving away.”
What do you think of these dogs? They’re puppies, like, of course. I mean, you know, so I might have a third dog by the time this podcast goes live. My wife hears this. I’m just kidding. We’re not getting the dog. But, you know, it’s one of those deals, man. It’s like, I’m an animal lover. That’s kind of cool. They got a Fitbit for dogs. I like that. And the GPS thing, obviously, is kind of cool too.

Glenn Gaudet
Yep. And then my third one—it’s not specific to this app, but I happen—for my podcasting app, I have an iPhone, so I just use the podcast app within the iPhone.
So it’s the one that Apple puts out there, but there’s so many others that have a lot of great features on it. But I’ve found that my life is so much better now that I listen to podcasts rather than listening to the radio when I’m driving or doing things, and I’m actually getting better information.
I think I’m getting better information because it’s not always interrupted every six minutes with an ad. So to me, podcasting like we’re doing here—you and I have spent almost an hour together here, relaying some information. People are listening to us. They know from where it’s coming from.
I mean, they can hear the integrity in the conversation. And it’s not always about, “Hey, okay, after six minutes, we got to flip over,” and then, you know, when we come back, we got to remind you what we just did in the past six minutes.
You know, it’s—yeah, it’s mind-numbing, right? I just want to get to the content, and that’s the great thing about using a podcast app.

That’s awesome. That’s awesome. Yeah, I’m a huge—like I said, I think podcasts have been around for a while, but I really think we’re going hot and heavy here in 2020, gonna go. And I know you’ve been doing it for a long time as well. So we see some huge value in it.
So we’re excited about doing the podcasting thing. So what about from a business perspective? Is anything—I mean, a podcast, I guess—is on the business side of things, any other fun business apps that you can’t live without, or software?

Glenn Gaudet
Well, in addition to our own—because obviously that is the thing that, of course, all of our focus on the business side. We use a couple of different apps. The core communication within the team—Zoom has been transformational, right?
We used to be a GoToMeeting company where we used GoToMeeting, but at the end of the day, Zoom became the killer app for us, quality-wise, and I think we’re recording it right now on Zoom. Yeah, that’s been a game changer for us because we also do our sales conversations on Zoom too.
Yeah, and whether or not the customer turns on their camera doesn’t matter. We always do. We want them to see us. We want them to create that relationship. You can certainly do it through audio, but there’s also something when you actually see somebody in a live conversation—it’s powerful.

Well, and it’s the same thing with this. This is a podcast, but I always do video because I think it’s important to have that connection, right?
And 98% of the people that I do—when they’re like, “I thought this was a podcast,” it is. But I love the video side because then I can see you, you know, how you’re talking and how we’re doing things.
There’s just that deeper connection, I think. And video definitely helps that we do our sales stuff as well. Like, if I send over a proposal, I do a video every time to explain the proposal, right? And say, I want to jump on a call and talk this over.
But I wanted to go over some of the things that kind of—some of the high-level things that we found about your website, your company, or whatever this is, and they love that because then it kind of has a little bit of a connection.
And then they want, you know—because there’s usually some questions, right? We want to be able to answer some of those questions, take that out of the way, and be able to move on to the next step of—you know, negotiate or, you know, talking about the proposal—actually, you know, person to person.

Glenn Gaudet
Right. Yeah. So that’s been a game changer. We also use this thing—they’re actually a local Boston company as well—and it’s a hardware and a software component, and it’s the meeting owl. I don’t know if you’ve heard of that.
They don’t have it, but it’s this little, like, kind of a tall speaker with a camera built in up at top, and it actually ties in nicely with Zoom. It’s in the middle of our conference room, on the table.
And so what it does, it actually not only acts as the speaker and microphone for everybody, but yes, it shows, actually moves to show the person speaking at the time.

Love that. Love that, right? When you said “owl,” and then when you said it sits in the middle, I thought, I know what it does. I know what it does. The head moves all around. That’s awesome.

Glenn Gaudet
So that’s been really cool for us to use for meetings, because the majority of our staff is remote, right? So we’ve got a small footprint here in Boston, but most of the people are working remotely from home, and frankly, we’ve got people all around the world.
And so it’s really nice for the folks who are in one room to actually be able to communicate in such a way where they don’t look so distant. And that’s where that camera aspect comes into play when you’re in a meeting like that.

I love that. I’m gonna have to look into that. I love that because I have a full remote team too, right? So my team’s all over the world—the same as yours.
And so if we ever do get together and have the conversation, you know, it’s kind of difficult unless we’re doing something like this, but if they’re in the room, it’s—you know—it’s like, “Oh, hold on, John’s talking. No, hold on, Jennifer’s talking. Oh, Mike’s—you know—it’s like, kind of interesting.”
So I’ll have to look into that. That’s another Boston company too? Even better. So I’ll definitely check into that.
So we’re at the end of this thing, but this is the depressing part where we’re gonna have to break up and go on and continue our day. I know this is gonna be hard for both of us, but this is just, this is how it goes, man. This is the difficult part of it.
But if I was to give you a 10 million, a winning ten million lottery ticket, oh, here we are—what would you— I know we’re set. Yeah, if you’re like, “Oh, do I say I want material things or don’t want to seem like I care?” No.
What would you do? What would you do with the money?

Glenn Gaudet
Ten million. Oh wow, that’s interesting. So what’s it? What’s interesting about this company is we never raised any venture capital money. So Bootstrap, we Bootstrap, and we’ve been going for nine years, profitable, growing. It’s been such an amazing experience with that.
So if you gave me ten million, I’d probably invest part of that into this company, because it’s been so powerful, right? Yeah, and at least I know that there’s a return coming for the investment, right? As I know how we’ve grown and what we do, and frankly, the affinity that our customers have for us, which is really powerful, that’s awesome.
I would also use part of that money to really have impact in other people’s lives, right? There’s a number of people in organizations that are in the top of my head that I could think about really having an impact, and it doesn’t necessarily come in the form of just writing somebody a check.
But I think that there’s ways to teach people how to fish, to use the expression, and using some of the money to do that to really have impact with different organizations and different folks as well. So love it. So those are the things that come top of mind, and I might take a little bit of a longer vacation than normal.

Yeah, as you deserve it. Glenn, you deserve it, buddy. I mean, right? I mean, at the end of the day. I mean, you got to give back to yourself too, a little bit, sure. So awesome.
Glenn, this has been an awesome podcast interview. I knew it was going to be. So if anybody wanted to get in contact with you or find out more about your company, can you give us some details?

Glenn Gaudet
Yeah. In fact, let me give you a link that they can go to if they want to learn more about employee advocacy or how to get started. It’s learn.gaggleamp.com/get started.
If you want to reach out to me, I’m in LinkedIn, so you can certainly reach out to me. Glenn Gaudet. My only request is, if you do make a connection with me, tell me. In that connection that you were listening to me on this podcast.
So I know you’re not just somebody who wants to try to sell me something, because I do get quite a few of those. And then on Twitter, I’m Glenn G with two n’s. Glenn G with two n’s.

If I had $1 for every time I got pitched on LinkedIn, I could retire. I actually did the numbers. It’s incredible.

Glenn Gaudet
Like, you know when I—unless I know the person, like, if, Shane, if, obviously I know you, I might send you a LinkedIn connection without necessarily putting a whole conversation, right? But so many people will send me a LinkedIn conversation and don’t bother telling me. How do I even know this? How do they know me? And, like, all of these things. And, you know, sometimes you’re like, “Oh, well, maybe I’ll do it.” And the next thing you know, you get something right back. “Hey, I’d love to get in your calendar.”

Every time. It’s so funny, anytime I look and it says, “I’m gonna help you grow your agency.” Like, if that’s their—what they do—I think every time I click it, I’m like, “Okay, I shouldn’t do this.” I click it, and it’s just instant. And I know it’s, it’s like touching the hot stove or something. Like, I don’t know why I keep doing this over and over, but anyway, so that’s perfect.
So if you guys need to get in contact with Glenn, obviously—Glenn, with two n’s. Glenn, you were an awesome host, as I knew you would be.
And you guys, if you’re listening to this podcast and like what you hear, make sure you subscribe to it as well. And obviously, if you guys like what you hear, please write a review. And if you don’t like what you hear, don’t write a review, because we want to leave the reviews, folks, that’s what it all comes down to.
So, Glenn, thank you so much. And once this thing goes live, obviously, when this thing goes live, we’ll go ahead and send you over all the fun stuff. We’ll let you know ahead of time. And thank you so much for being on the podcast, man.

Glenn Gaudet
Shane, just remind everybody that you were in my podcast and they can listen to that. Yeah, pure digital marketing.

Yeah, it was all about influencer marketing. I think it was the thing. So, yeah, take a look at that. Just put in Gaggle plus Shane Barker, and I’m sure that the podcast will show up number one. So awesome, man. Thank you so much, bud!

Glenn Gaudet
Thank you. Have a great weekend.