Hope you guys find it useful and also do let me know your views on the same

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?

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.”

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?

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

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.