But what are the implications for businesses that get serious about social media? Are there hidden dangers lurking for companies whose employees are “too good” with social media? This article will explore five benefits and five threats of celebrity employees.

The Employee Celebrity Is Born

Organizations around the world are wisely trying to dive into social media to take advantage of the new opportunities. The promises of “crowdsourcing” ideas and creating “viral” success stories have a huge appeal to companies of all sizes and industries. However, in doing this, companies are also creating something they never anticipated: the employee celebrity.

The Shift to Managing Talent

An employee celebrity is someone in your organization who has a positive reputation apart from or in addition to your corporate brand. Social media allows for great personal branding in addition to corporate branding, so a shift in power and need happens when employees become celebrities and begin to see themselves as talent rather than average employees.

When you’re working with talent, there are inherent benefits and potential landmines. Just ask any coach or owner of a professional sports team. Here are five opportunities and five threats with employee celebrities:

Five Opportunities of Celebrity Employees

#1: A Human Connection

Customers and prospects get to connect with a human they trust at your company who’s genuinely worth giving attention to. As a result, brand awareness, customer service and increased engagement opportunities occur. (Example: Frank Eliason at Comcast, known as @comcastcares on Twitter.)

#2: Enhanced Credibility

Your celebrity employee brings your company credibility it never had or hasn’t had in a long time. (Example: Robert Scoble during his Microsoft days.)

#3: Better Insight

Your celebrity employee knows the heartbeat of your customers and can accurately anticipate reactions to policy changes, new products or brand adjustments. (Example: Lynsay Caylor at Pilot Travel Centers listens, learns, reports and acts because of their Facebook page.)

#4: Enhanced Influence

Your celebrity employee has the attention and trust of interested and potential customers. These are the first people likely to spend money with your company. All they have to do is talk about it and watch the fans run with it. (Example: Steve Jobs is the ultimate celebrity employee.)

#5: Crisis Management

Your celebrity employee can set the record straight if a PR crisis occurs because the platform is already in place and trust exists between the employee and his or her following. (Example: Steve Rubel has addressed specific situations when his employer, Edelman PR, came under fire.)

Five Threats of Celebrity Employees

#1: The Power Player

Your celebrity employee develops a following that is more loyal to him or her than to your brand, products or services and attempts to wield that power to make changes the company doesn’t want to make. The celebrity knows he or she has influence with customers and they’re willing to use it for personal benefits rather than corporate benefits.

#2: The Gunslinger

Your employee celebrity angers customers with an idea, opinion or mistake that then reflects badly on the company and creates a PR crisis. Often this kind of celebrity employee will apologize but also relishes the additional attention that comes from the controversy.

In 2009, James Andrews, an employee for Ketchum PR, was flying into Memphis to do a presentation to their client, FedEx. After he arrived in Memphis to go to FedEx headquarters, he tweeted that “he would die if he had to live here“.

The people at FedEx saw it and called him out on it. Then the whole thing went public and Ketchum PR had its own PR situation. Ironically enough, Andrews was going to talk to FedEx about the power of social media.

#3: The Chatterbox

Your celebrity employee accidentally or unknowingly reveals secret corporate information and your company has to decide how to deal with the information leak. The tendency will be for the leadership or employee celebrity him- or herself to pull back from the public discussion after a situation like this, but you want to deal with it proactively and likely publicly through the same means that caused the trouble in the first place.

#4: The Free Agent

Your celebrity employee decides to leave the company for a new job and take his or her following along. The opportunity for the company is to decide if they did everything they could to retain the employee. This also supports the idea of getting more people in the company involved so if one person leaves, you haven’t lost an entire segment of your conversations.

#5: The Diva

Celebrity employees may get so focused on celebrity status that they’re difficult to work with or merely uninterested in the normal work because they’re so focused on growing their tribe. Unfortunately, this person has seen your company as a stepping-stone to greater things for a long time. Now it’s just more obvious. Despite the potential frustration, don’t burn bridges here because you might have a relationship with a rising star.

The Adjusted Reward System

The thing that makes celebrity employees unique within the structure of your company is that previously the employee’s primary rewards were a paycheck, occasional encouragement, and the hope for a promotion someday.

Now, however, they can create a following that cares more about them than their own manager probably does. The company keeps on supplying the paycheck and the employee keeps on fulfilling his or her role, but the attention from the customers creates a reward all its own.

You Need Each Other More Than You Think

The irony in most cases is that the employee attained “celebrity” status in large part because of the company he or she worked for. The company name backing them gave immediate authority to the public.

The employee’s own abilities, however, took the company name and endowed authority to the level that made it truly beneficial to both the company and the employee. They need each other more than they think they do.

The pressure social media and employee celebrities bring to the workplace is mostly positive. It changes the dynamic from “human resources” to “talent management” and that’s really a good thing for everyone.

Businesses will get better people, employees will be better people, and customers reap the benefits from the whole arrangement. Employee celebrities will be viewed as a threat in some companies, but they’ll be rock stars in other companies. Social media gives every organization yet one more thing to consider for the future of their business.

So, do the benefits outweigh the threats? Does your business have a celebrity employee? Let us know what you think in the comment box below.

So what better way to understand social media than by looking at the fundamental principles of influence as taught by Dr. Robert Cialdini, professor of psychology and marketing at Arizona State University? In his seminal book, Influence, Cialdini covers six “weapons of influence”  that are hardwired into our social and cognitive minds.  In other words, we can’t help but behave in accordance with these laws of social interaction.

Does this sound like something useful to keep in mind during your social media engagements?  Well, let’s take a look six powerful persuasion techniques:

1. Reciprocation

In Cialdini’s words, the rule for reciprocation “says that we should try to repay, in kind, what another person has provided us. If a woman does us a favor, we should do her one in return; if a man sends us a birthday present, we should remember his birthday with a gift of our own; if a couple invites us to a party, we should be sure to invite them to one of ours.”

And so it is in social media: we’re more likely to retweet someone who has already retweeted us.  We link to people who have linked to us.  And we tend to give a business far more trust after it has provided us with a lot of free value.

Used manipulatively, this turns into autofollow bots that help you amass thousands of followers in a breathtakingly short time—none of whom may actually care what you have to say.  Doh!

Used more positively and constructively, if you focus on initiating reciprocity by providing no-strings-attached value to those in your network, you’ll ultimately wield far more influence.  Not because the gift economy is a new fad in marketing, but because following the law of reciprocity is how we’re wired as humans.

2. Commitment and Consistency

“Once we have made a choice or taken a stand, we will encounter personal and interpersonal pressures to behave consistently with that commitment.  Those pressures will cause us to respond in ways that justify our earlier decision,” said Cialdini.

Chances are, you follow too many people on Twitter.  And you’re signed up for more RSS feeds and newsletters than you can really read.  Objectively, purging your list of followers and unsubscribing would eliminate distractions and increase your social media signal-to-noise ratio.

But most people never make that purge and hardly ever unsubscribe.  Part of it goes back to reciprocation, but a larger part stems from consistency: you’re loath to admit that following and subscribing to those people and newsletters was a mistake.

On the positive side, how much more likely are you to comment on a blog that you’ve already commented on before?  Especially if you’re now “signed in” to comment on the blog during future visits—and if your Gravatar or Disqus headshot shows up next to the comments?

According to the principle of consistency, you’ll want to remind people of their previous positive commitments through perks, public displays, an elimination of friction for increasing their commitment, etc.  It works for Amazon prime, Amazon’s 1-click ordering, and Amazon’s reviewer system, and it will work for fostering blog comments and a blog community, too.

3. Social Proof

One method we use to determine correct behavior is to find out what other people think is correct. We view a behavior as more correct in a given situation to the degree that we see others performing it.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=GA8z7f7a2Pk

Just watch this video to see this in action!

Whether we admit it or not, most of us are impressed when someone has a ton of blog subscribers, Twitter followers, YouTube views, multiple blog reviews for their upcoming book, and so on.

Yes, people can game the system (autofollows and such), which can jade our intellectual response, but our core and initial emotional reactions stay the same.

On the positive side, creating a lot of value for others can help companies and individuals gain social proof via reciprocation: writing engaging content for guest posts, offering to interview authors and subject matter experts, and so forth.  Not only do these activities provide social proof in themselves, but they can help you gain a support network capable of “salting” your blog comments, your retweets, etc.

And when it comes to social proof, tribes matter.  It’s not just about what the mass of people are doing on social media that constitutes proof, it’s what other like-minded people and peers are doing.  So according to the principle of “social proof,” you should concentrate your social media efforts on finding and building social proof within your tribe.

4. Liking

“We most prefer to say yes to people we know and like,” says Cialdini. Extensions of this principle are:

1. Physical attractiveness creates a halo effect and typically invokes the principle of liking;
2. We like people who are similar to us;
3. We like people who compliment us;
4. We like things that are familiar to us;
5. Cooperation toward joint efforts inspires increased liking;
6. An innocent association with either bad or good things will influence how people feel about us.

How does this work for social media?  Well, to start with the virtual equivalent of physical attractiveness, we give extra credence to attractively designed blogs, messages contained in videos with higher production quality, and corporations’ landing pages displaying a better sense of social media savvy in their overall design and layout.

Similarly, individuals involved in coordinating joint ventures for the common good are associated with—and therefore “haloed” by—those efforts, while at the same time invoking cooperation toward a joint effort, which further increases “liking.”  Think of Seth Godin’s efforts at compiling free and thoughtful ebooks and then using the compilation to raise funds for a non-profit.  Bryan Eisenberg’s Trick or Tweet efforts from a year ago also come to mind.

As for complimenting others, what else is a retweet, a trackback, or a positive blog comment than a social compliment?  And yes, those are all activities you should participate in authentically, sincerely, and liberally if you wish to leverage the principle of liking to your advantage.

5. Authority

Cialdini talks about “The extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of authority…”  In his book, he examines how authority can be conferred by (and also manufactured by) titles, clothes, and trappings.

In social media, authority is less about titles and clothes than about virtual trappings.  In his (fantastic) report, “Authority Rules,” Brian Clark talks about how perceived expertise can frequently differ from real expertise.  Meaning that the guy known for blogging about and offering intelligent commentary on a subject will likely have far more perceived expertise (and therefore influence as an authority) than a genuine but unknown non-blogging expert.

But perhaps the most direct measure of authority is the number of people who will buy or download a recommended resource based on little more than an authority’s endorsement.  How many people would buy a copywriting book simply because Brian Clark said it’s a must-read?  How many people will download a free PDF on nothing more than Seth Godin’s evaluation that it contains important insights?

But one thing social media has seemed to spark is a dawning understanding that authority is (or should be, at least) limited to a legitimate field of knowledge.  So when a relatively famous figure like Robert Scoble states on his website Scobleizer that search engine optimization isn’t important for small businesses, he’s “taken to task” on it rather severely.

6. Scarcity

Apart from reciprocity, this is perhaps the most used tool in social media.  When bloggers open up a class or inner circle membership or subscription service, it is never for an unlimited number of customers or for an always open/unlimited time.  Smart bloggers either create or fully leverage already existing scarcity by limiting seats available, length of time to buy, etc.

Laura Roeder has rather famously made scarcity a centerpiece of a signature technique,  wherein bloggers hold competitions with free services as a prize.  When contestants don’t win, they then value the prize more highly precisely because of the newly perceived scarcity.  This makes them more likely to accept a consolation prize of getting the services at a slight discount.

Parting Recommendations

While the six principles of persuasion started out as “weapons of influence” that were used against us by “compliance professionals,” I—along with Cialdini—would encourage you to practice the positive side of wielding influence. To sum up many of the recommendations from the post, here are some very positive ways to leverage the principles of influence to increase your social media success:

• Focus on creating value and initiating the reciprocity principle by gifting your social media contacts with high-value content, insights, reports, etc.
• Sincerely flatter your subscribers, friends, and commenters by responding to them and nurturing your growing community.  Actively reach out to people you admire using social media and pay them the compliment of commenting on their blogs, following their tweets, linking to their content, etc.
• Commit to consistent engagement on the social media platforms you chose to use, to the point of staying away from new social media platforms that you don’t have the resources to actively participate in.
• Use social proof as credibility cues where appropriate.  Show off your number of subscribers next to the Subscribe button.  Possibly use colleagues to “salt” your comments on important posts, build up your network by guest posting, commenting, and retweeting.
• Coordinate within your community on larger efforts for the greater good.  You’ll probably be psyched at what you create or accomplish, you’ll do good and feel good about it, and you’ll likely become associated with the effort.
• Put the extra effort in on achieving professional and inspiring design.  Dress for success on your blog, website, and social media landing pages.
• When creating a contest or trying to spark immediate action, use the scarcity principle to positive effect.  But be honest about it—no changing “last day for” dates, no miraculously replenishing supplies, etc

But, hey, I’d be THRILLED to add to the list if you recognize any of your tried-and-true techniques as falling within—or totally falling outside of—these weapons of influence.

What are your secret weapons of influence? Let’s engage.  Please comment below now.

Have you ever wondered how a business handles more than a million Twitter fans? Want the inside scoop from the largest retailer on Twitter?

Even if you’re a small business, there’s some great insight to be gained from Marla Erwin, Interactive Art Director for Whole Foods Market. Marla was instrumental in creating Whole Foods’ acclaimed social media program and the results have been phenomenal! For example, in the first year, Twitter.com/Wholefoods gained a million Twitter followers. It has now surpassed 1.75 million people.

If you’re not familiar with Whole Foods, it’s the leading natural and organic food store in the world with nearly 300 locations in North America and the United Kingdom.

Whole Foods Market is the most popular retailer on Twitter and is a leading example of Twitter’s power to build millions of relationships a single customer at a time.  Here are key excerpts from our interview (you can listen to the entire exchange at the end of this article).

Marla Erwin, Whole Foods Market

Mike: Marla, what was the tipping point that got Whole Foods to say, “We need to get involved with the social media thing?“

Marla: As far as timing, mainly it was there. Twitter was getting big. It hadn’t really broken out into the mainstream – full of celebrities and a lot of new sources just yet.

But when we hooked up with it about a year and a half ago, it was clearly going to break out and we thought, “We had better get on this. It’s where people are.”

As someone said at a conference I recently attended, “You want to fish where the fish are.” We realized this is where our customers were going to be.

Mike: What were you hoping to achieve in the beginning?

Marla: We wanted to just connect with people. It’s very easy for people on the outside of a company or an organization to see you as a monolith. You’re a corporate entity or you’re a building or you’re a logo or you’re this giant chain of stores, when really we’re a whole bunch of laid-back people with pretty idealistic visions of what we want to do.

It was a good way for us to communicate that and also to let people know some things about us that maybe they didn’t realize; for example, the philanthropic mission of Whole Foods in terms of our Whole Trade programs and our Local Producer Loan programs and so on.

I feel like social media is falling into buckets right now where people are using it for sales and marketing, people are using it for customer service, or people are using it to establish a corporate personality and corporate culture. We’re trying to do a lot of these things, and depending on the venue, one medium might have a greater percentage of one of those than the other, but they all balance out in the end.

The first thing that we did, even before we got on Twitter or Facebook, was just to incorporate some user-generated content on our website – recipe reviews, product ratings and so on, and comments on our blog.

Mike: How do people get to your blog?

Marla: It’s Blog.WholeFoodsMarket.com. Or if you’re on our main website, just look for links to our blog, which is called “Whole Story.”

The blog has a lot of editorial content, everything from articles on how to conserve and recycle to cooking tips and profiles of some of our local producers.

After the website and the blog, we started with Facebook and Twitter. Facebook is very similar to our blog in that we have a lot of editorial content. It’s a little bit more conversational. We invite engagement more. We ask people, “What do you think?” or “What are some of your ideas?” We try to get more of a conversation going.

On Facebook, unlike Twitter, everyone can see each other’s comments, so it becomes much more of a group conversation.

Twitter we use primarily as a customer service tool. We do promote our blog content and we may mention, “We’re having specials for the holidays,” and that sort of thing. But our number-one focus on Twitter is customer service.

Probably 90% of our output on Twitter, if you go to Twitter.com/wholefoods, is directly responding to people who have questions. They’ll ask us, “Can I get this at my local store?” or “What are your holiday hours going to be?” or “Can you tell me a gluten-free alternative to cornbread stuffing?”

Whole Foods has more than 1.7 million followers on Twitter.

Mike: I understand that you have over 150 different Twitter accounts. Can you give me the rationale for having so many different accounts and maybe how you use the different Twitter accounts?

Marla: We started out first with our global account Twitter.com/wholefoods. For about a year, that was all we had.

Then we thought, “It might be neat to niche a couple of accounts.” So we have an account for cheese. It’s called Twitter.com/WFMcheese. That’s our cheese expert who has a quadruple PhD in cheese. She’s one of the world’s leading cheese experts. It’s a terrific niche account.

We also have a wine account and an automated account for recipes.  So that’s four accounts. The rest, the 150 plus, are our local stores.

Mike: For businesses that might have stores or chains, what kind of oversight do you have or recommend? Is it typically done by an employee, a manager of the store, or a cashier? Or is it somebody special who’s not actually working at the store?

Marla: The first thing we found is that not every store has someone who’s really familiar with social media or with Twitter specifically. So we did provide some guidance to these folks in the form of a very, very casual document that was part tutorial: “What’s the difference between an @reply and a direct message?” It was also part guidelines: “Here are some things you shouldn’t do and here are some things you should do.”

For the most part, we’ve pretty much let them run with it. A tight control from a corporate level would be exactly the opposite of what we were trying to achieve, which was to decentralize the responses.

I definitely think that people who tweet on behalf of an organization need to be in it. If you can find the wonderful combination of someone who really knows your business and really knows social media, then that’s the person to use, even if they’re in the meat department or they’re a cashier.

Mike: I want to talk about your master account, your main Twitter.com/wholefoods account.  A lot of the social media pundits out there say that you need to have a physical face behind a brand. I know Whole Foods has not done that. Why did you choose not to put a face behind the Whole Foods Twitter account? What are your feelings and rationale about whether you should have a face behind the brand?

Marla: That was a conscious decision, definitely. We considered both sides of that question and I do see both perspectives. When I was trying to articulate our thinking on this, it fell into a natural ABC thing, which is “authority, boundaries and continuity.”

Authority, to me, just means that it is very clearly a corporate account. With the verified accounts now, this is less of an issue. But we wanted to make sure that it was very clearly the official voice of the company and not one person’s opinion.

Boundaries just means that if you keep your personal account and your professional account separate, go ahead and talk about whatever you want in your personal account. Talk about your favorite football team and talk about where you took the kids for dinner.

Then there’s continuity. When we first started our Twitter account, there were three people in on the account. We would all sort of jump in and tweet or take turns or handle different areas of it.

Now we’ve got one person, Winnie Hsai, who has really stepped up to the plate to manage our social media presence. She does most of our tweeting. If she were to win the lottery tomorrow and leave us, we wouldn’t have to worry about introducing a new person. It would still be the Whole Foods account. There wouldn’t be that sort of jarring disconnect.

Finally, another one that is important to me because I’m a designer is a distinctiveness to having a logo in your account. For example, Frank Eliason at comcastcares is definitely one of the trailblazers of customer service on Twitter. Yet when I’m scanning my Twitter feed, he looks like 10 other guys that I follow.

But when I see Starbucks, instead of seeing Brad Nelson’s face, I see the Starbucks logo and that jumps out at me. I like that distinctiveness of having our branding there.

Mike: Do you think if you were a smaller retailer that you might give the same advice to your peers who are really small?

Marla: That’s a very good question. I’m glad you asked that because I do see a lot of benefit in small businesses having a more personal face.

There is a local dog grooming place that I follow. I’m going to take my dog there because I like the individual I’m corresponding with. I feel that personal connection and I think, “Yes, I’m going to bring my business to you because we’ve talked.”

I think for a small business the rules would probably be quite different than for a large company.

Mike: Let’s talk about Facebook a little bit. How are you using Facebook? How are you using it differently than Twitter? If Twitter is predominantly for support, what is Facebook for?

Marla: Facebook is a really good extension of what we’re trying to do with our blog, which is to promote more of our editorial content. Because so many of our stores have Facebook accounts as well, it allows us to do more local promotions.

But on our global account, we exploit its strengths and weaknesses as opposed to Twitter’s immediacy in one-to-one. We are able to expand a little bit more in Facebook. We can have longer posts, we can post photos, and we can post videos.

The tradeoff is that Facebook is somewhat more passive. People come to you. People will subscribe to your feed on Facebook, but it tends to get lost more, I think, than on Twitter. That’s just my personal experience.

There is also that community aspect where people can respond, not only to us, but to each other, which, because of the way @replies work on Twitter now, has fallen off quite a lot, but is still quite strong in Facebook.

Whole Foods has more than 175,000 Facebook fans.

Mike: Have most of the folks who have discovered you on Facebook and Twitter discovered you through the good old-fashioned viral nature of the two networks?

Marla: I believe so and I think there’s an awful lot of dissemination from the global account.

On our website, wherever we had a link saying we’re on Twitter, we used to send people out to Twitter.com/wholefoods. We realized we were doing that wrong. What we needed to do and what we have done is built out a page at WholeFoods.com/twitter. On that page, we list all the different accounts we have so people can see, “Oh look. There’s not just this global account. There’s also an account for wine, which I would be interested in, and there’s also an account for my local store, which I would be interested in.”

Because Whole Foods has 150 Twitter accounts, it created a page on its main website to help customers determine which accounts to follow.

Mike: I understand that you also have an iPhone app. Can you tell me a little bit about what it does and how it has helped you?

Marla: It’s called Whole Foods Market Recipe and it’s primarily a recipe search app. We have a database of recipes and the iPhone app lets you search those recipes and then not only search by ingredients, but also filter by special diets such as ” vegan recipes” or “gluten-free recipes.”

It also has a store locater. When you find the store nearest you, which you can do either by the automatic GPS location or by typing in a zip code, it takes you out to the page for that store. From there, that page links out to the Facebook account if they have one and the Twitter account if they have one as well.

Mike: Let’s talk a little bit about the future. What do you see happening from a social media perspective down the road?

Marla: I think the same thing will happen with social media that has happened with everything else. They will begin to consolidate and to align quite a bit more than they are now.

Social media has taught companies an enormous lesson about breaking down walls. But the applications themselves don’t seem to have learned that. They’re going to have to learn to be more open and transparent.

Twitter is especially interesting to me right now in that it’s being driven in two directions simultaneously. The individual users are driving it from the bottom up and Twitter, working very hard on its business model, is trying to drive it from the top down in some directions that will be more attractive to businesses.

Mike: What is on the horizon for Whole Foods as far as social media? Is there anything that you are working on that you could share with us?

Marla: We actually, for the size that we are, have a really tiny social media program right now and I would love to see that expand.

As new apps come along, for example, we’re looking at some of these location apps and trying to figure out how we can participate in some of those. We’ll definitely expand our presence as much as we can.

Mike: Thank you so much, Marla. If folks want to learn more about what you’re doing or more about Whole Foods, what sites would you recommend they go to?

Marla: WholeFoodsMarket.com is our primary website. On the top of every page, you will find links to our Twitter and Facebook pages as well as to our blog. Those are WholeFoodsMarket.com/Twitter, WholeFoodsMarket.com/Facebook, and also our blog at Blog.WholeFoodsMarket.com.

Mike: Thank you so much for all this great information. It was very, very insightful.

Marla: Thank you, Mike. I really appreciate it.

Listen to the rest of this interview (below) and learn a lot more about how Whole Foods sets up and manages its social media efforts.

What do you think about Whole Foods’ social media programs? Do you shop Whole Foods and have you engaged them online?  Leave your comments below.