Corporate branding is how people in society think of your business. Personal branding is how other people think of you. Corporate branding has always existed as well as personal branding. But the rise of social media created a strong correlation between these two. What employees post on their social media, which reflects on their personal branding, does almost immediately affect the corporate branding of the company they work for.
Because it is accessible to everyone online, people assume that those shared ideas and thoughts are also what the company endorses. Before the social media phenomenon corporations were able to handle the situation and do damage control most of the times silently. Today this is almost impossible unless they have a godfather or godmother in the higher ups that help them bury the evidence, so to speak.
What to do?
What employees could do is not sharing anything that is not related to your corporate brand and doesn’t post anything that could negatively influence your personal brand. If you do, anyway, it will be online and people can/will find it, even if you secure it. For example on, Facebook not everyone is using their privacy settings properly and even if they did there are ways to eventually obtain the information using add-ins or chrome extensions available online for free.
Avoid posting things on your professional social media, think of LinkedIn for example, that you don’t want people to see and relate it to your workplace. If you do, especially if it’s something dumb or silly, after a few years when you are establishing your business or looking for a new job, those could be added to your profile and they could seriously damage your business reputation. It’s true that when we are young we usually do silly/ dumb things 90% of the time. The old generation could in some cases get away with it but the new generation has everything online and I mean “everything.”
Another concept to consider is freedom of speech. If you are influenced to not post something doesn’t it affect your freedom of speech? This is a very delicate line to cross. The concept of freedom of speech has been misused by many to allow all sorts of destructive expressions including those that are denigrating to human beings. Nonetheless, there should be a platform for people to be able to express their thoughts but how do we separate it from our professional/business platforms? There should be a way, right? Does it really matter if people are still able to find it online?
The formula of how to maintain the corporate branding above water has to change. Management and employees require training to be able to handle different scenarios they could face. Today we are not only talking about what they post on social media and where to post it but also how they interact with people, which could also be filmed and eventually posted on social media. If nothing gets done the branding will drown in a series of comments and opinions that will influence the decision making. The training should not only focus on the online representation of the company but also on the face to face interaction with clients, marketing representation targeting several groups in society, and the most “appropriate” way to share opinions online. It’s basically learning the etiquette of how to behave with clients and how to behave on social media. Sounds logical but then how do we implement it?