Your Employees Are On Social Media, You're Right To Worry: 5 Worst Case Scenarios

By Joe Gagliese, co-founder and CEO of a global influencer marketing and technology company Viral Nation.

As people around the world increasingly embrace social media, the companies that employ it are facing a whole new set of PR and HR mishaps. Yet most of them do not take the urgent measures necessary to prevent them.

Part of the reason they aren't is simply a general lack of awareness, as companies tend to bury negative incidents when they happen. This means that the occasional warnings we see in the media (eg, "Employee fired for racist tweets") are just the tip of the iceberg of what is really going on. I'm sure of it, because I have the unfortunate scoop: as the CEO of a social tech company working to find a solution, I regularly meet with senior executives from some of the biggest brands in the world, and many have entrusted to tell me that they are already experiencing the fallout from employees on social networks.

Here are some common issues we encounter.

An employee's personal content on social media goes viral.

Sherwin-Williams recently faced a public backlash for firing a part-time employee who went viral on TikTok for his paint mixing videos. The paint company's reasoning was "serious misconduct", despite the worker buying the company's products he used in his videos himself. After the TikToker shared a video talking about his firing, fans slammed Sherwin-Williams for being out of touch, insensitive and missing out on a great marketing opportunity by parting ways with a passionate employee instead of teaming up. with him.

Meanwhile, Apple is getting its own unwanted publicity for a similar situation after an employee - who arguably didn't actually violate his big tech employer's internal social media policy - shared some safety tips with a fellow TikToker who had lost her iPhone. If the world's largest company isn't immune to this kind of fallout, you can imagine how widespread the risk is for everyone else.

An employee follows a direct report on social media who feels uncomfortable but pressured to agree.

This is just one example of the uncomfortable, complex and uniquely difficult to manage dynamics emerging in the business world, as personal and professional lives become blurred with the growing ubiquity of social media. There are countless goofy scenarios: a male employee follows and messages his female colleagues during off hours; a supervisor seems to only make friends on social networks with certain privileged members of his teams, etc. When employees start following each other on social media, how do companies establish guidelines to best prevent HR issues? At the same time, how do they not take policing too far? For the majority of companies, these...