Social-First Employee Partnerships

Do you remember when, a few months ago, a Chick-Fil-A employee got in trouble for posting favorable TikToks about their sandwiches?

She resigned soon thereafter and immediately signed a deal with Shake Shack for THEIR chicken sandwich.

Unless you work at a big pharma company with a really, really good in-house cafeteria, your colleagues probably won’t be posting about chicken on their lunch breaks.

But they may want to post about a day in the life at the lab bench or the moving remarks from a visiting patient advocate.

Many of us communicators have been trained to be SO careful that you may start to feel butterflies in your stomach at the mere mention of these scenarios.

In this age of mixternal communications, where there’s no longer a brick wall separating internal and external, a key opportunity to promote our orgs’ values, goals and messaging is through employee ambassadors via – you guessed it – their PERSONAL social media accounts.

You may have to be the bearer of bad news to Legal when you inform them that, no, in fact you should not require employees to seek approval every time they want to mention your company’s name in a social post.

The risk is there, sure, but in our role as communicators, we can mitigate this by actually encouraging colleagues to post by providing positively-oriented guidelines and resources.

That’s the difference between a list with a bunch of red x’s and suggestions for what type of content is not only permissible but invited.

This is one of those instances where, instead of being the gatekeeper, we can be a supporter, a champion of change, and an advocate for both employees and corporate.