Here’s an interesting ethical question: is it OK to ask employees to share company and client news through their personal social networks?
Here’s a hypothetical example. An agency has just launched a new ad campaign and posted the TV spot on YouTube. Is it OK to send an all-hands email asking people to share the link on Twitter and Facebook?
Let’s take it a little further. Is it OK to ask them to sign into YouTube using their personal accounts, and rate the video? It seems harmless enough, doesn’t it? You’re not telling them how they should rate it, after all.
But what if you asked them to leave comments? Any normal agency or client side social media policy will tell them that they have to disclose their relationship with the makers of the video. And you wouldn’t really want a whole bunch of comments that start “Hi, I work for the agency that made this ad and I think it’s really great,” would you? What makes the two things different?
Digging for victory
OK. Another hypothetical example. The social news site Digg is a huge source of traffic for most news websites. The Telegraph, for example, gets around 75K visits a day from the service. That’s an awful lot of traffic.
The thing is, with Digg, you really want to make the front page if you want the big traffic. Around 10K stories are submitted by users to Digg every day, and only 150 or so make it to the front page. So we’d need to be smart.
Digg is less open to being gamed than it used to be, but let’s say that a smart agency could still deconstruct Digg’s algorithm sufficiently that it can use its network of staff to improve the chances of a story (or review) making it to the front page that shows their client in a positive light.
All they’d need to do (say) is send an all-hands email that mobilised your staff to digg a particular story at the right time of day. Would this be legitimate? Digg clearly thinks not, but are they the best judge?
Ballot stuffing
Let’s say a client gets nominated for a Webby or one of the other user-voted awards out there. It’s common and acceptable practice for web services to use any means at their disposal to beg for votes.
So is it OK to send an all-hands email asking your staff to register and vote? Is it OK to ask them to use their Facebook and Twitter accounts to ask their friends and followers to vote?
Here’s what I think
I think that this is an ethical minefield, but I’ve got a couple of clear points of view that are up for discussion. First off, and from a purely business perspective:
If it’s valuable then clients should pay us to do it. If it’s not valuable we shouldn’t do it.
Ignore the ethics. When was the last time you sent an email that said, “Please share this with your friends and use billing code xxx.xx when you record it on your time sheet”? Of course, it only takes a few seconds to relay a message (fewer if you simply copy and paste the message from the all-hands email to your social media presences). What the hell – it’s all just part of the team spirit, isn’t it?
But if this service is of any value at all to the client, then we’ll see the demands on our time beginning to increase. Soon we’ll find ourselves doing several a day. Larger agencies with more staff will offer a more valuable service to clients than boutique agencies (“We have a thousand trained staff with Twitter and Facebook accounts primed to promote your campaign!”)
We could even work out some kind of ratcheted scale that said that people with more Twitter followers could bill at a higher rate; or we might start looking at unduplicated reach.
This might seem fanciful, but stories like the uSocial’s offer to game Digg’s front page for around $200 tell us that the thriving black hat market for this sort of thing is getting a little greyer.
If clients value this, then they should pay us. If we give it away as a “value added” service, then are we sure that we’ve communicated this properly so that the client understands the value we added?
How can we be certain we aren’t just undermining our digital value proposition?
Now, here’s the tricky bit where I bring ethics back into it. If we’re paying our staff to relay messages to their networks on behalf of our clients, what makes this different from spam?
Employees personal networks are their personal property
I’m one of those people who believes that the boundaries are blurring between our personal, public and professional lives. My colleague Chris Nee has posted about the presentation of self in social media, expressing a lot of how I feel rather better than I could myself, although that hasn’t stopped me from covering this elsewhere — notably in a discussion about our social media policy where I said:
I think that a good PR person is someone who manages their relationships well; who can tread the fine line between doing good work for their clients without abusing or exploiting their relationships. Who recognizes the value of their personal network, and their personal brand.
Do we have a right to ask our employees to use their personal networks on behalf of our business? I think the answer is – of course we do. We pay experienced staff more partly because of the social capital that they’ve managed to accrue in their address books. When you leave your job to go to a new agency, you’ll take your contacts with you along with all the shared experience, the favours you’ve done, and the favours you owe.
So if part of the reason we’re paying them more is because of that network, then we clearly value their network.
So why on earth would we encourage our staff to spam their personal networks?
I trust my peers. I don’t trust spam monkeys
Part of the reason for the success of social networking tools like Facebook and Twitter is that I can choose who I follow and who I don’t. I can restrict conversations to a bunch of people I trust and respect. Sure, I’ve got lots of Twitter followers with names like “Sophie1982″ and “EdelmanHR” but that just means that they hear my inconsequential blatherings, not that I have to hear theirs!
And I follow a lot of my colleagues’ Twitter streams. I’m pleased to say that these are — on the whole — full of meaty chunky content and devoid of spam.
But if we increase the spam content, what will happen? Here’s what (in the absence of evidence) I believe: their follow rates, retweet rates and mention rates will all begin to drop off. From your experience, what do you think?
Where does this leave us?
I’ve put a somewhat one-sided argument here. I’m sure I’m open to all sorts of rebuttals like, “surely, if the content is interesting/useful/entertaining then our staff will only be adding value to their networks?” and “but surely it’s up to them whether they want to pass it on to their friends?” I’ll wait for these to roll in before I start trying to address them.
But here’s what I think. I think that we’re trying to teach our colleagues to learn from managing their personal communities in order better to manage our clients’ communities. Anything that teaches them to prostitute their networks is a retrograde move.
Am I wrong?
The boundaries are more blurred in a small company, where you *are* the business. The trick is to learn to promote your *own* brand in an ethical/acceptable/palatable manner. Something I’m thinking about a lot just now, as a director of a small company and twitter addict, and I appreciate it’s very different from a PR company perspective.
I think you’re right. We can’t be asked to spam our personal networks, and spam is exactly what this stuff is if it’s not organically discovered.
Yes, if I worked on a campaign and felt sharing a video (for example) would help, I probably would. And if the agency did something that was a) really cool and b) relevant to my contacts or a large number of my contacts, I probably would.
But I object to being asked to spam my friends/contacts. If a client wants something seeded, they should pay to have it seeded.
great post mat. we’re wrangling with the very same issue over here at WS Towers. naturally, wherever possible we try to follow the most ethical path (although between you and i, policing this can be tricky when there are thousands of you all over the world). mass Digging of client stories is out of bounds. but we are encouraging all staff to use/review Digg for their chosen beat and if they naturally find client news and give it the thumbs up, then i don’t think there’s any real harm done. but all hands mails harvesting mass votes is a definite no-no. as far as retweets and facebook mentions, i think where the employee knows they are followed by/connected to influencers who they know would be interested in the story then there’s no harm – after all we’re often retained by clients for our connections. but if the client story is not directly related to your beat, then don’t push it. again, all hands mails asking for the whole company to spam in unison isn’t going to do us or the client in question any favours. i’m trying to encourage the powers that be to let me publish our guidelines for all this stuff, so that we can all weigh in and help make them better. watch this space (well, not THIS space, but my space). keep up the good work — james
Mat,
Tx for –again- an extremely nice discussion. I follow you completely on the fact that clients that benefit from the Social Media Reach of the agency and its employees should pay for it. Tricky part is how. Most of our clients pay fees for us consultants, and they consider these fees “high”. While we can agree that this a matter of perception, we should ask ourselves what it is the client thinks he is paying for. For clients who deal with consultants specialized in press relations, they would assume that the consultants´ social contacts with the journalists are included in the X/hour that the agency is charging for that employee. We can sweet-talk clients into paying an arbitrary fixed fee for “updating contacts and maintaining database” etc. You cannot tell a client to pay more for employee Q than for employee Z because Z has twice the journalist contacts…. Then again if Z has more contacts, is better, he/she will probably be higher ranked, and have a higher hourly fee.
I do think that more and more, our clients will assume and require that the agencies social capital (and that of its employees) is included in the fees that are charged. We´ll have to make sure that we´re able to quantify an office/region/employees social capital, and monetize that. Do we do it as part/ add-on to the hourly fee? Do we go for an more add-agency oriented way by charging per 1000 people reached? Do we go for an effort based (per hour) or a result based (per x reached)?
You and I combined reach about to most of twittering UK and Belgium… will a client honor that in an extra fee-add on? Or will they think that that reach is included in our rate-table. It´s an interesting question….
Danny
I think the crux of the argument is around the short term value of exploiting employees networks versus the long term impact.
So while it would be great for clients if as a value added or charged service an angency could guarantee that it could make a video viral or get the front page of Digg, how many times would they actually be able to do that before Digg changed the rules or employees found their networks decimated?
Of course, if staff don’t declare their business affiliation on their personal networks then their parent companies are steering very close to astroturfing…
Great discussion. My input to this discussion is not dealing directly with agency compensation for social media efforts.
However, I would like to present a thought that the involvement agency staff in favor of the client in social networks will largely depend on the communication context in which the client operates. If it’s a client who is respected and active in the social networks/online and has clearly defined values and ethical principles for this area, it is entirely in order to supports him.
If a client is outside the online context any involvement in it would be seen as unauthentic and therefore agency should start with an advice to develop strategy and principles for this space (and this is what we should be paid for, isn’it?)
Recently our client – an online shop – opened standard shop in the real world. I felt it very natural that we, who work on the account all support him in our social networks. This is possible only because customer has many fans online and sentiment towards the brand in social networks is very positive.
In regards of ethics behind this decision, it could be described as ‘practical imperative’ – “Act so that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in that of another, always as an end never as a means only.”
I’ve thought about this a bit and here is my current view: I’m okay with the agency asking me to use my personal brand as long as they understand that it’s my choice whether to deploy it.
I do fear that it will become standard industry practice for agencies to expect employees to subject their personal stuff to the will of the account. This is not in the interest of the employee or the agency, since as you have stated, it will dilute the value of those brands and reduce their effectiveness in the long term. If this became the case, I would expect employees to simply maintain separate undisclosed social media identities for personal use along with a token ‘official’ identity that the employer has influence over. These tokens would of course carry much less credibility online.
A more uncomfortable ethical question IMHO comes up when employees face the dilemma of self-censoring themselves online when it comes to commenting on issues related to clients or competitors of clients. I’m not aware of an example of employee social media activity effecting a client relationship, but I’m sure it is inevitable. Even worse, since these comments are archived for all eternity, how long until an old comment that someone has legitimately made about a non-client surfaces to meddle with a new-business prospect?
Short answer, no.
Long answer, noooooooo. It’s just gauche.
Nice article and thanks for sharing your thoughts. I firmly believe that every organization big or small should have a social media policy. Recently I completed an analysis on usage of social media and its impact on productivity and have published my findings here http://www.gigathoughts.com/social-media/do-you-have-a-social-media-policy-for-your-organization.html
Hope you guys find it useful and also do let me know your views on the same