Do you know if you are being Sold by your Organization?

You are hired in an organization for your services and in turn, the organization offers its services to the clients and gets hired. But in today’s competitive market companies want to look better in front of their clients, prospective employees, and the world at large (aka CSR), so advertising and social media marketing has become necessary.

The one trend that is gaining traction of late is to market the companies on social media through the employees. There are tons of posts on social media with organizations desperately trying to catch the eyeballs and garner the likes. Following are a few such instances:

1. New employee announcements:- “I am glad to inform you that I have joined XYZ… company“, “We welcome our new stars…to the team“. Especially if you are on LinkedIn you would see a handful of them every day.
2. Birthday announcements:- Companies are announcing the birthdays of their employees on social media.
3. Photos and Videos of Internal Events:- Internal celebrations, events photos, and videos are floated for the whole world to see.
4. Accomplishments:- Any award or recognition given to you is not restricted within the organization but exposed to everyone on the internet.

There are two grave issues in this practice:

Employee Privacy:- If an employee is hired, does that mean the end of her privacy? Do the organizations take the employees’ consent before posting their pictures? Most of the time employees are not even informed before such pictures and videos are posted. Most of the employees might not object or might not even understand but there is still a segment of people who are wary of floating their pics and videos on the internet for multiple reasons.

The people doing social media posts within the organization are provided no guidelines, no sensitivity training of what is right and what is wrong to post, how to handle adverse comments, etc.

Ironically organizations have ironclad NDAs and policies to protect their data and privacy but they don’t give a thought about their employees’ privacy.

Blatant Marketing:- Most of the companies are blatantly trying to market themselves with such posts, through their employees rather than anything else.  Many companies even force (and most at least prod) their employees to post good reviews, photos about achievements, likes, comments, etc. on the internet to gain traction.

A company providing a laptop, a bag, and few accessories on an employee joining, why does that need a promotion? Isn’t that the minimum that every company needs to do to make the employee comfortable so that he can be productive?

Rather than improving the work environment, the pain points, the processes, companies are simply trying to create a rosy picture for the potential employees and the rest of the world. The best part is that most of the companies don’t even have the measure of the outcome of such marketing strategies.

What can be done?

The issue of privacy and shadow marketing is not very well understood by the majority of the population (despite working in the IT industry) but organizations need to understand this and control it better. At the very least educating the employees, taking their consent, and shunning this marketing strategy. And the employees should raise the issue internally in case they are uncomfortable with any of the organizational posts or their picture being floated without their consent.