Zeitgeist Du Jour

We started out this month talking about how we as biopharma communicators can foster a social-first employee partnership, despite the abounding compliance issues we face.

We’re CLOSING the month by looking at this in reverse, thinking about, as Digiday put it last week, “how extremely online culture is showing up outside of social media.”

The White House recently hosted a Creator Economy Conference, and the president told folks in attendance that they’re “the future.”

There are SO many microtrends these days, most of which seem to originate on the Tik-Tok.

We’re not even on Tik-Tok but know about them.

Why? Because we hear about them somewhere else.

When we google terms like “demure” and “brat,” we see explainers from major news orgs like the BBC and NBC.

We’ve started seeing thoughtful reflections and analysis about these terms – particularly in our comms world – on other platforms, like here, on LinkedIn.

Beyond ensuring awareness of what we in the biz may term big news stories and key mentions of our orgs and clients on social, we’re going to need to start to be fluent in some of these trends, too.

While there might be the occasional opportunity for a brand or executive in our industry to publicly hop on a trending bandwagon, we don’t see that very frequently – understandable.

But because what’s happening online is becoming part of our OFFLINE culture, that means that we are the de facto arbiters of figuring out how that translates to integrated comms strategies, including employee engagement.

Understanding the zeitgeist du jour and finding small ways to allude to some of them internally is another way to show that company leaders are attuned to what our colleagues are experiencing outside of the lab and office.

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.