According to Sprout Social, team member advocacy is the promotion of an organization by its staff members. People trust recommendations and content from people they know. They trust these people a lot more than they trust marketing messages from companies on organic brand social channels or paid social media advertising. We know this when a team member can post the same content the brand channel publishes, but because the message was more personal, more human, the team member gains significant engagement over the brand channel.
To enable all GitLab team members to confidently and comfortably share GitLab related stories on their personal social media channels in a way that is risk adverse yet provides measureable performance.
Bambu by Sprout Social is an employee advocacy platform for you to share content across LinkedIn, Twitter or Facebook. Bambu enables you to quickly and easily share content on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook to amplify our brand reach and help establish your personal brand on social media. The goal of this tool is to centralize content that is valuable to our audience.
First, you'll need to confirm that you have been assigned the Bambu application in Okta in order to use it. If you are not assigned Bambu in Okta and you are interested, please reach out to the team in the #social-advocacy Slack channel.
You'll need to log into Okta and locate the Bambu by Sprout Social logo tile. Click on the Okta tile. IF you haven't made an account yet, you'll be prompted to do so. You'll always have access to Bambu via logging in with Okta.
Once you've logged in for the first time, save a bookmark in your browser for https://gitlab.getbambu.com/login
Click the login with SSO option at the bottom of the page to log in whenever you want.
When you log into Bambu, you will see a collection of stories curated specifically for you.
This is a centralized hub for you to learn, build your reputation online, and help spread the word about GitLab by sharing these stories with your networks on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. We made it easy to share, too.
When you click the share icon on any story, you’ll see that we’ve added a suggested status update. Of course, you’re welcome to adjust or completely rewrite it to match your own voice (the only exception to this will be when you’re sharing content that needs to be worded a certain way for compliance reasons, in which case, we'll say so in the notes). However, sharing to Twitter requires customizing a minimum of 20 characters in the copy suggestions we provide. This is because Twitter would otherwise see a lot of tweets with the exact same text and each of these posts would be marked as spam and receive no impressions, engagements, or clicks. This is a feature of Bambu. When you go to schedule a tweet, you'll see a note requiring you to update the copy.
As often as you like, but try to make a habit of logging in at least once a week, as we are constantly adding new and useful information.
We will make sure that any time-sensitive stories find their way to you through Slack, like in the #whats-happening-at-gitlab channel.
There are other ways to stay in touch with the latest stories to share:
Create a recurring Slack reminder to check Bambu once a week or every other week
If you run your workday via your calendar, consider adding a 25 min block once a week or every other week to login and share the latest stories
It’s possible to spend less than 25 minutes every time you log into Bambu to schedule content on your social media channels for a week or two. We highly recommend taking advantage of the “Send Later” button feature when you want to share a story.
The GitLab Social Team are the administrators of the social advocacy program. Admins have all access to our tool, Bambu, as needed to operate the program. Admins may act as curators from time to time as well.
If you have questions or would like to learn more, consider sending a message in the #social-advocacy Slack channel.
| Name | Role |
| Alisha Ward | Senior Social Marketing Manager |
| Wil Spillane | Technology Owner and Admin |
Curators are selected intentionally to drive our advocacy content strategy and specific team members are asked to take on the role of a curator as a part of their everyday jobs at GitLab. We will have curators representing all areas of GitLab the brand and the product in order to curate a list of related content worth sharing on social media.
Curators have all Reader access as well as the ability to curate stories and submit them to a Manager or Admin for approval.
Join the #social-advocacy-curators Slack channel to stay in touch with the curator program and the latest news. This channel is intended for team members who are identified as content curators only.
All team members can access the Stories feed, share to their social networks and leverage the Suggestions feature to submit links to a Manager or Admin for complete Story curation.
Access to Bambu is provided via an Okta tile - please log in to Okta and find the Bambu logo tile to Log on.
Join the #social-advocacy Slack channel to stay in touch with the program and the latest news.
While we have a team of content curators working to add relevant and fresh content for the whole team to share on a regular basis, you may come across content that you'd like us to consider adding to Bambu, mainly content from 3rd party sources: your own blogs or a partner website link. Here's how to suggest content to an admin to add to Bambu.
Please note that most of what is approrpriate to share that comes from GitLab will be curated already.
Elevate the way they use Bambu, and in turn produce more content shares, engagement and overall content impact. You can become a power user in less than 15 minutes a day!
We certainly don’t want you to share just for the sake of sharing, but with Bambu, you’ll have relevant content curated for you almost daily. By sharing more often, it signals to your social audience that you are a go-to source of information and expertise.
Schedule content in advance using the content scheduler function in Bambu. Consider scheduling posts during your timezones regular business hours — at the start of the work day (7am - 10am) around lunch time (11am - 1pm) and just after the end of the day (5pm - 7 pm). What works for your followers may also be different - it's important to check out post performance and to try out different times to see which would work best. Sorry, Bambu doesn't provide "best time of day" for scheduling posts.
Scheduling stories on your social media channels is the best way to automate some of the manual work behind promoting content on social media. While it still requires you to check out Bambu and to edit the copy suggestions, you can "set it and forget it" and bulk a week or two worth of social posts in one short period of time. This is how the scheduling feature looks in Bambu.
Bambu let’s us include suggested post copy for you, but to truly stand out and resonate with your audience, customize the suggested post copy to reflect your perspective on the content you’re sharing. Make sure to incorporate best practices like hashtags, tagging handles and others outlined in our social advocacy handbook. And remember, it's required to change 20 characters of the copy for Tweets, so have some fun with it.
Pro tip: If you’re stuck on what to say, think “how would I explain this content to someone if I was talking to them in person?” and use your answer as the basis for your copy. People react well to posts that sound like a human.
When your audience really connects with a post you’ve shared, they may comment with their thoughts or even a question. It’s a great opportunity to start a dialogue by replying to their comment and sharing more of your perspective.
Pro tip: Aim to reply to comments within 1-2 days to keep the conversation timely and relevant.
The Slack integration will allow us to broadcast a Bambu story link to Slack, giving our team the headsup on big news items that we'd like to share. This will allow GitLab to continue operating like GitLab. You can also check out the latest stories on Bambu inside of any Slack channel by using /bambu for a private message showing you our top stories.
Onboarding: Access to Bambu is provisioned via Okta. Team members are automatically assigned Bambu by Sprout Social during the Okta onboarding process and are informed of the tool after the first week in the onboarding issue.
Offboarding: When a team member loses access to Okta, they will also lose access to Bambu. This provides an automatic way to revoke access to former team members. However, the account will still appear in Bambu itself. The team will need to delete the Bambu for inactive team members.
Access Deprovisioned box.We'll run contests for team members from time to time to enable more sharing across particular topics or campaigns. You'll find out about these contests in the #whats-happening-at-gitlab Slack channel in the coming months.
Bambu provides a report center to outline all of the possibilities here.
Conversion Rate - the percentage of team members invited to the program that are actually participating
Active Participation - the percentage of team members that are engaged in the program and sharing on any given reporting period (week/month/quarter)
Top Contributors identifying top contributors helps to understand the kind of content that will work best and recognizing top contributors is a good way to keep the program engaging
Organic reach - the number of people seeing content shared through Bambu by our team member advocates
Engagement - measuring the number of actions taken on content shared through Bamby by our team member advocates (think likes, clicks, comments, and shares)
Ad value or equivalency - similar to how we measure this for the brand, this is measured in a dollar value for advertising determined by the sum of a reporting period's equivalent CPM + CPC costs
There are dozens of employee social media advocacy tools, many of which operate similarly. We chose Bambu due to the deep ties with our existing social media management software, Sprout Social, and the potential to streamline the "brand-to-team-member" content process. It's also pretty easy to use.
This project has operated inside of the social team for a long time and has had to overcome many challenges from across the company in order to launch. We're thrilled that you'd want to provide feedback, however, we've developed the program with the right team members attached and providing feedback. For your ideas, please consider opening an issue for a future iteration where the team can consider your ideas to be included at a later time.
Yes, that was a part of the original goal. Using GitLab issues for social enablement is an extremely manual process that has not been efficent. Bambu will allow a centralized and easy to use administration to the entire company while also helping us to understand performance metrics.
GitLab is not given any personal information about your social media profiles, actions, comments, DM, or any other element. When you connect your social media channels to Bambu it provides a way for you to schedule and publish content on your social channels automatically using all of the APIs available on these social channels. It also provides a top level, no context review of performance metrics on *posts you published on your personal social media channels through Bambu only.
The data that GitLab receives shows your posts published through Bambu:
GitLab cannot see who liked your posts, what their comments were on your posts, who shared your posts, or any information relating to posts that are not published through Bambu (so all of your personal activity is still personal).
Here is a look at the data that is personally identified with individual team members. Note again that we cannot see the context behind the data and this is only for content that is scheduled and published through Bambu.
There may be an issue with the page you're trying to use for the story. Preview images, titles, and text are dictated by the data in the frontmatter of the page, and we may not have control over what appears here. Learn more about how to determine what information gets pulled by social channels here.
No, we do not have this feature activated and it is not on our roadmap.
Yes, there is a suggestion feature built into the tool. You'll see a Suggest Story button on the top left of your screen. However, we have an active group of curators who are responsbile for curating content. We are asking that the team keep their suggestions to away from topics that are already accounted for with DRIs. Please connect with the DRI for a topic if you believe a piece of content should be added, since they are the responsible party on their assigned topic. Applying a team member's suggestion is entirely at the discretion of the social team and/or the assigned DRI for a specific topic and is subjective to what else is being promoted, if there are more important pieces of content for that topic, etc.
Please keep in mind that providing a suggestion is only the first piece of the work necessary for the content to appear for the entire team to share on Bambu. We'd still need to vet the content for standards, legal review, write copy for the posts, and release it to be available in the platform. Adding suggestions adds more work for the social team and our team of curators, so make it worth it!
While Bambu offers the possibility to connect with both Salesforce and Marketo for appropriate attribution, these features have not yet been activated. Issues for connecting Salesforce and Marketo are opened and need to be completed. If you believe these connections are important for your use of Bambu, please reach out to me and the other stakeholders in the appropriate issue linked above.
The content in Bambu comes from a group of GitLab team members we call curators, they help us to source and promote content that is important in their line of work. Folks from the security team will provide security related content, our all remote team will provide content about remote work, and so on. If there is a focus that is not being represented and it would provide content that the team actually wants to promote, please reach out in #social-advocacy-curators Slack channel with your idea. Please note that in the first few months of this program launch, we are not prioritizing more topics and more curators, so while the idea might be great, we'll need to add any additional thoughts to a future iteration. Learn more about our curator program.
This could be a for a number of reasons. If the topic is already covered in Bambu, the DRI may not have gotten to review this content yet or may have deemed other pieces more important to include. If the topic is not already covered in Bambu, this would be why it's not on the platform. At this point, we could discuss it further if you reach out in #social-advocacy-curators Slack channel with your idea. Please note that in the first few months of this program launch, we are not prioritizing more topics and more curators, so while the idea might be great, we'll need to add any additional thoughts to a future iteration. Learn more about our curator program.
Sales: We're interested in getting our sales team and their sales-adjacent partners access to content that will help them drive better results as well as plug into the tools they use, like Marketo and Salesforce, for proper attribution data.
Talent Brand: We'd like to work with the talent aquisition and talent brand teams to curate more employer brand content that could lend in securing better talent in our pipeline.
If you are in one of these teams and would like to volunteer your time to build these iterations out, please reach out to the social team in the #social-advocacy-curators Slack channel.
Here are some best practices for using Bambu for GitLab-related social media posts.
Make sure your copy follows the AIDA Model, a copywriting formula to drive interest and action from your audience.
Try to visually break it into paragraphs or one-liners (even using emoji/bullets) for longer copy. For example:
GitLab has been a catalyst for change when it comes to the evolution of #DevSecOps.
That’s why we were recognized as a challenger in the 2021 Gartner Magic Magic Quadrant for Application Security Testing! 🏆
Learn more about this award. 👇
You can always go longer or use threaded tweets, but this is a good recommendation based on the top performing posts across these channels.
Feel free to disagree with people. Try to inform the person (respectfully) and provide any links they may need to make a more informed decision. Begin your response with “I disagree” as opposed to “You’re wrong.”
Sometimes, the best course of action is to walk away and not engage with the person at all. Use your judgment in how you approach rude or off-putting comments from strangers in real life to help you decide.
You can choose not to engage with arguments, step away from the conversation and delegate to someone else, or give a simple acknowledgment (e.g. “Thanks for sharing your opinion.”)
For a foundational understanding of these nuances, read GitLab's guide to communicating effectively and responsibly through text.
If you are unsure if you should respond to someone who has responded to your posts, join the #social_media_action Slack channel and ask for feedback.
If you've written a blog for our site, contributed to our latest release, or joined a webinar/webcast, you should want to tell your networks about it. Not only does this provide a way to build your following and expertise in the public domain, but it's also a great way to add critical promotion to your work. Promoting on social media isn't just about the GitLab brand channels. It's an orchestra of efforts, which includes team member support and advocacy.
Profile assets for social media can be found in the corporate marketing repository
Please do not use the GitLab logo as the avatar for your accounts on social. You are welcome to use our branded banners, but your profile avatar mustn't lead users to confuse your account with the official GitLab accounts.
While you should display the fact that you work at GitLab in your bio if you intend to advocate for GitLab on social, we suggest that you avoid including the word GitLab in your handle. Team member advocacy is incredibly valuable, and we are lucky to have so many engaged team members, but creating an account to solely post about GitLab is not adequate. Team member advocacy is so powerful that people trust employees more than brands and executives. Your advocacy is powerful when it is authentic, and having an account that only exists to promote GitLab will not ring true to others who browse your tweets.