Photo credit: Tobias “ToMar” Maier via Wikipedia.org
It now seems common practice to publish a social media comment that promotes your own employer without identifying yourself as an employee and masking your affiliation by using a Gmail or other generic email account. I’ve encountered the practice multiple times on my own published articles. The practice is deceptive and deceitful. It should be stopped.
PR, SEO and marketing agencies and departments should ban the practice.
The practice violates Federal Communications Commission (FCC) regulations that require employees to disclose their relationship with employers when promoting their companies on social media.
FCC Guidelines on Disclosure
Listing your employer or client on your profile page isn’t enough, according to the FCC. People who just read what you post on a review site won’t see that information.
“Put yourself in the reader’s shoes. Isn’t the employment relationship something you would want to know before relying on someone else’s endorsement?” the FCC says in a Q&A.
FCC guidelines also require employees of SEO, PR and marketing agencies to disclose their relationships to clients when posting. In addition, agencies should not tell their employees to endorse products they haven’t used or say things they don’t believe.
The FCC doesn’t require companies to monitor all social media comments by all employees, but it does recommend establishing a formal policy and periodically reminding employees about it. If a company finds that an employee has posted a review on a company product without disclosing their relationship, it should immediately ask the employee to remove the post or reveal their affiliation.
While not disclosing an employment relationship is misleading, deliberating hiding the affiliation is devious. Ultimately, such deception destroys credibility.
Ethical Solutions
Employees as brand advocates can be a powerful marketing technique, but only if used ethically and legally. ATT&T demonstrated how to turn employees into social media advocates and meet FCC transparency guidelines. It simply instructed employees to always use the hashtag #ATTEmployees when posting to show they are company employees.
No matter what government regulations say, ethical business practice requires full disclosure of affiliations on endorsements and promotional comments.
Recommendation: Companies and their SEO, PR and marketing agencies should issue a formal notice requiring employees to conform to FCC regulations on identifying themselves as employees or agents in all social media posts, including comments that mention their employer or client.
The underhanded practice of hiding affiliations badly tarnishes brand reputation. Full disclosure and transparency in all social media communications by employees and corporate agents ultimately benefits the brand.
What do you think? How would you recommend employers and agencies address the issue? Comment below (with proper identification :–) please.
William J. Comcowich founded and served as CEO of CyberAlert LLC, the predecessor of Glean.info. He is currently serving as Interim CEO and member of the Board of Directors. Glean.info provides customized media monitoring, media measurement and analytics solutions across all types of traditional and social media.
