Of late I have been hearing about companies strongly ‘asking’ their employees to publish corporate content on their personal social media feeds like Twitter, Facebook, and Linked-In. I’m not a fan of letting employers spam my friends. If I want to share something it needs to be something I’m interested in and something my followers are interested in. Thus I decided to share some thoughts about companies asking for social media shares.

Since I will be talking about some of the social media practices at Dell Technologies I’d like to say up front, that I am an employee of Dell Technologies. (#IWorkForDell) This statement becomes important here in a bit and you’ll see why.

Reasons For A Share

So why do employers find it so tempting to ask employees to promote corporate messages on their employees social media feeds?

My thoughts are:

• Many are enticed by Nielsen research from April, 2010 that has shown “[….] 92 percent of consumers around the world say they trust earned media, such as recommendations from friend and family, above all other forms of advertising […]”
• The other tempting thing, from my perspective, is the ready made “share of voice” that is gained when an employee shares on social media.

In both of these cases this puts the message in front of more consumers, and general wisdom is the more people you reach the better the chance that someone will be interested and become a customer. It’s a very constrained and telling way to look at it.

If you will, a company can try to have hundreds of social media accounts to reach thousands of potential customers or they can ask employees to do it for them. This makes logical business sense but it gets a bit more messy when you start digging into it.

The Mess

Some of the mess happens when you start looking at the following:

• Delivering the whole message
• Consistency
• Private accounts
• Fairness
• Employee personal brand
• FTC requirements

Let’s dig into some of these points, starting with delivering the whole message. If an employee is being asked to broadcast a canned message on their social media account, the first question I always ask is, will the person broadcasting the message be able to have a follow on conversation or know who can. If all they are doing is parroting the message what good is it if someone is actually interested in the message and engages them on it. They won’t be able to have an intelligent conversation about it.

This is a loose loose type of social interaction. The employee’s personal brand is damaged because his or her followers are not able to trust him or her further on such things. And the company’s message is lost because the follow on messaging couldn’t be delivered. A lost opportunity!

When an employee sends out a message on their personal social media account, they may customize the content of that message. This may create an entirely new and unintended message. Thus unintentionally lessening the impact of or completely turning off viewers of the message. As any marketer knows, if the message isn’t consistent, it can create problems down the road and there is no guaranteed way to insure a consistent message from private accounts.

When employee’s own the social media account it’s a private account. In some instances employee’s may have multiple accounts with the same social media platform. If they have multiple accounts then there must be a reason for it. Most likely to reach different audiences. Where does the companies message fit in those accounts?

Asking an employee to spread a message across multiple accounts consumes more of their time. In rare cases consuming so much that they are only focused on pushing out the message across all of their accounts. This can place an undue strain on the employee, as they may not have access to social media tools that can speed messaging on their personal social media accounts.

Personal accounts also pose another problem, they are private accounts. That means a corporate message could wind up right next to the post about an employee’s child loosing their first tooth or a recipe for egg drop soup. These are great if the employer is a dentist or a restaurant, but not so much if you work in just about any other industry.

This should also make everyone ponder, is content like that fair to the reader, the employee, and the employer? My personal response is that it is not. It’s not fair. It’s not fair to the grandma who hardly knows how to use the social media platform, Nor is it fair to the employee who is disrupting their personal brand. And it most certainly it isn’t helping the company because neither a lost tooth or soup are their target market.

Fairness extends beyond just the consideration of content placement. Employers must also consider if they are being fair and consistent with all employees. If the request is only made of a few ‘highly social’ employees, does it speak poorly of the other employees? Does it have the potential to create a discriminatory environment in the workplace? All of this may well create a very cumbersome HR mess.

‘Asking’ employees to share company posts can also be disruptive to the personal brand the employee is trying to create. For example if the employee is working on creating a personal brand focused on their underwater basket weaving abilities, an unrelated post on hydroponics can be disruptive to the employees brand. It also means that their effort to post the message is wasted. It’s not helping the employee grow their brand readership, nor their credibility. The company also looses out, the reach may be greater but it isn’t resulting in additional customers. In many cases this is a net loss to the company.

That gets us to the last bullet in my list of why ‘asking’ employees to share content creates problems. Not just anecdotal problems but, legally ones for both employee and employer. It’s not well known outside of social media marketing groups that the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) expects social media posts to clearly state bias. It’s a fancy way of saying if someone is posting something on a personal account their interest should be disclosed. The FTC views that as “Native Advertising.” See: Native Advertising: A Guide for Business

In researching this blog post I ran across an interesting story in Ad Week. The long and short of it was that the FTC and an advertising agency reached a settlement after employees were encouraged  to promote a project on their personal social media accounts without disclosing their bias. The FTC has said “Agencies asking their employees to spread the word must instruct those employees about their responsibilities to disclose their relationship.” See: The FTC’s Endorsement Guidelines: What People Are Asking – Employee Endorsements

There is a lot more to read on the FTC’s policies on bias. I recommend checking out the FTC website and a website called “All About Advertising Law” by Venable, LLP who has a post titled Your Social Media Policy, the FTC and the DOL.  Both of these resources have more material than can be covered in this blog post.

All of the above are reasons why companies should be extremely careful asking employees to share material on social media. In all fairness though I do post about some of the things I’m working on that may be of interest to my social media followers and fits my brand. I just don’t post everything blindly.

I’m also happy to be part of Dell Technologies when it comes to social media. Dell Technologies has a really good social media training program for employees. They also have a well defined social media policy (you can read it here http://dell.com/socialmediapolicy). It’s also great having leaders that are active on social media. You probably know who they are.

All that said. I’m not a fan of blindly tweeting company content just to tweet content. In fact reading this you can probably guess for me to share on my social networks it has to be retentive to my communities. I can sum this up very simply by paraphrasing 1 Corinthians, Chapter 13, Verse 1, I want to love what I share; I don’t want to be  “a resounding gong or a clashing cymbal.”

What are your thoughts on this? Share them below.