July 19th, 2009
The psychology of social media: Can a visible brand ruin your life?
Workplace Impact
Dan Schawbel wrote a great article for BusinessWeek in which he discusses how social media creates new roles for employees, and how many employees don’t realize that they are building their personal brands along with building their company’s brand. He writes:
Building personal brands and strong networks is critical right now. The economy has made the job market so cutthroat that there are 5.4 candidates for every open job, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. If you aren’t meeting and exceeding corporate expectations, you may turn into a job seeker before you know it. To stay competitive in this environment, the two most important words for employees are “value” and “visibility.”
Employees have to be careful, however. As Dr. Pamela Rutledge said, the perception of social media success in a company depends entirely on culture. And being sensitive to authority becomes a more delicate issue than ever before.
As an example, let’s circle back to the engineer whose external visibility rocket fires past that of his boss due to his blog and social networking presence. The boss has a few choices as to how he might handle this situation:
- Empower the employee by supporting his success and working to integrate external activities into the daily job. Leverage the employee’s external visibility for the greater good of the company. Play up the employee’s successes internally, recognizing that it makes him look good as a manager as well.
- Talk out of both sides of his mouth. Give the employee the go-ahead to continue the external brand-building but make him or her manage all activities outside of work hours. Play down accomplishments internally. Over-assert authority.
- Pull the “conflict of interest” card and demand that the employee scale back his external communications (even if he isn’t speaking on behalf of the company) and also require the employee to now help the manager build his own brand instead.
All employees would prefer the first option, but that puts companies in a challenging position. If being a “spokesperson” for your company isn’t a natural part of your job, it’s hard to integrate external personal branding into a position without compromising some of the work the employee was hired to do in the first place. At the same time, options two and three are tricky, because if you have a recognizable, successful, hardworking employee you want to reward them - and you don’t want to lose them to a competitor.
“Successful managers, bosses, employers and partners make sure that their values are reflected in their behavior and business relationships,” Dr. Pamela Rutledge said. “Jealousy, turf wars and resentment come from fundamental human emotions of fear and insecurity. Security is learned (or not) from your environment… if there are a lot of turf and tong wars in your company, look to the corner office. The apples don’t fall far from the tree.”
Next: Responsibility of the Employee –>
Jennifer Leggio, aka "Mediaphyter," writes about the "social business" side of social media - including enterprise, security and reputation issues. See her full profile and disclosure of her industry affiliations.
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