There are advantages and disadvantages as well as data ethical considerations by associating the employee’s private social media accounts with the company administrated Employee Advocacy platform. The main pro et con by associating Employees social media accounts a can be described as follows:
For good reasons, asking the employees to associate their private social media account(s) can be limiting the number of employees we want to be included in the Employee Advocacy program. This precondition for participating will in practice change the program from Employee Advocacy to a Social Ambassador program and thereby miss out of the main benefit for an Employee Advocacy program, namely; employee engagement
The main reasons the employees are hesitant to associate private accounts:
The uncertainties are many and employees with high awareness of data privacy will most likely not associate private account with a company administrated platform!
There are two major angles on reporting and insights:
No doubt, the level of data insight by associating social media accounts is higher than not doing so e.g. you will get statistics on views and likes etc. However; its discussable what value these data gives. Social media counts a view/impression after 3 m/s (in practice just scrolling by). The real value of view/impressions can best be illustrated by the fact that no one is buying paid media on views anymore – paid media is acquired on click basis – WHY should post`s by Employee Advocacy be different?
Associating employee’s private social media accounts will enable insights on like views, impressions and emojis… “vanity metrics”.
The prerequisite of succeeding with employee advocacy is employee engagement. High employee engagement will drive the overall business goals of EA:
To get any meaningful insights of “employee engagement” its must be a large number of the company employee there are invited to share content on social media. This metrics will therefore in most cases be meaningless if a company are using Social connect and thereby only is having a limited number of employees involved.
The risk of associating Employee Social Media Accounts with Company Employee Advocacy is twofold. Firstly in regard to Company limitation of liability, if said Social media Accounts become compromised in any shape or form. Depending on Company risk aversion and policy, accounts compromised from a breach in Company it could equal lawsuits from employees if appropriate technical and organizational measures can’t be documented correctly. A breach in the Employee end of things could mean misuse, access and the spread of misinformation through Company channels. Secondly, by requiring employees to use their personal Social Media Accounts in regard to Company Employee Advocacy, might shed doubt on the legal validity of the consent required from the Employees. Any breach, compromise of data or potential disagreement could be leveraged against the Company, because it will be almost impossible to prove that the consent was freely given due to imbalance between Employee and Employer.
From a data ethics point of view its questionable to associate employee’s social media account with the company owned employee advocacy account as its by design compromising the boundary between the professional sphere and private Sphere