Employee advocacy is a big deal for most consumer-facing companies. I know this first-hand since I have worked on employee advocacy programs—either to kickstart one, or to plan to the strategy of an existing program—during my agency days. When I quit 9-to-5 employment in 2018, and became an independent consultant, I have also worked on large employee advocacy engagements involving 1,000+ employees.
The simple premise of employee advocacy is to get employees to talk about the products or services their companies offer in a transparent manner. In the beginning of social media (late 2000s), only senior leaders used to talk about their own companies, products, or services. Eventually, since social media democratized everyone’s voices, even a shop floor worker or a front-line employee in a fast-food chain can become a credible (when it is transparent, with full disclosures) advocate. When there is a disclosure, people do not question the intent of the employee but simply use it as another source of information to make their decision to buy into that product or service. In most cases, it is not about information at all – it is just visibility and cueing.
Given this backdrop, what the US-based fast food brand Chick-Fil-A’s did recently sounds nothing short of stupid!
Here’s what happened.
Miri, a 22-year-old employee at Chick-Fil-A, started posting videos of her free employee meal at the chain, on Tik Tok. She started in February this year and each video had a different item from the menu. So, for her viewers, it was almost like being aware of a new item off the menu and create an interest in trying different things that they may not have yet considered. And she offered commentary as she ate them – friendly and easy to relate to commentary.
Soon, her video views rocketed and so did her followers.
Last week, Chick-Fil-A’s PR team reached out to her. You would be wondering if they congratulated her for the efforts and roped her in officially into the brand’s marketing team, right? Nope!
According to Miri, Chick-Fil-A’s PR team actually told her that their corporate rules bar employees from posting videos about their own products and asked her to stop posting videos!
This is absolutely bizarre.
There are many versions of the Chick-Fil-A employee handbook online (belonging to multiple outlets), but the closest I got to, to understand this rule, is this:
“Team members may not post online, on any social media or internet site, any statements on behalf of the Company, without express written permission from (the franchise owner)”.
Another handbook adds: “You may not blog, “tweet” or post entries on the internet (whether through a social network such as Twitter or Facebook or using another method) while you are on duty unless you have written authorization from the (franchise owner) to do so”.
Now, why would a company have such a policy? A few possible reasons do exist.
1. Once it starts, a company the size of Chick-Fil-A, with thousands of employees, simply cannot check which employee posts what. To be sure, even without a rule, this could happen anyway. A rule in a handbook is only some HR/Legal person’s view, at best. If Chick-Fil-A checks the most popular social media platforms, I’m sure they would find a lot of their existing employees probably talking about their products already. It’s just that Miri was a bit too famous and came into the PR team’s attention, I assume.
2. If employees post videos or offer comments on their own products without disclosing that they are employees, that would amount to astroturfing, a deceptive practice of presenting reviews/opinions in the guise of unsolicited comments from the public. When exposed, astroturfing could be a PR nightmare to handle and affects the company’s reputation.
3. There are enough cases of employees (particularly from fast-food chains in the US) in uniforms indulging in behavior that could damage the company’s reputation. ‘Disgusting Domino’s People‘ is a famous case study from the early days of social media (2009).
It happened again, as recently as February 2024 too!
But these exceptions do not mandate that you bar all employees from posting anything about the company.
4. A lesser reason could involve imagining that those who post could become famous and find better employment elsewhere, perhaps even in a rival chain. But this fear is exaggerated at best. Good employees will go places anyway, regardless of whether they share videos and become famous.
I do not know the reason that Chick-Fil-A’s PR team offered Miri for asking her to stop posting videos, but it seems preposterous. Here’s an employee making their products famous, has garnered 100K followers in a short span of time and had many million+ view videos. Any sensible company would get both the marketing and PR team to equip the employee to up her game, produce better videos, plug her content into the corporate PR and marketing campaigns, and look for ways to employee content to better effect. But Chick-Fil-A asking her to stop posting videos by pointing the rule book is the last thing any half-decent company management would do.
In fact, this was my mandate at Maruti-Suzuki India. The idea was to train employees (picked from across multiple divisions, from sales, to research, to shop floor, to HR and marketing among others) the basics of social media (since this is NEVER taught in any formal way to anyone, ever – it is always ‘monkey see and monkey do’), help them understand the power of their voices online, understand the perils of what they say and how they say it, social media platform nuances, content articulation nuances, and give them a spectrum of topics that they can talk about, picked from their own personalities and interests, and about the organization. They also got to do interactive exercises on picking content and drafting them in interesting ways.
For large companies with thousands of employees, employee advocacy needs to be a carefully planned program. Some employees may have a natural flair to produce interesting content about themselves and about the company, but many may not. The program planning and cadence needs to take into account this nuance and create waves of training programs accordingly. The kind of hand-holding needed by different sets of employees needs to be taken into account too.
Miri was transparent about employment status at Chick-Fil-A in her videos. She introduces herself as an employee, speaks about the free meal she got as part of the employee perks during their break, and generally produced content that is perfectly functional and clean. There was zero controversy in her content. I short, she is the perfect employee advocate for Chick-Fil-A, which doesn’t post anything on Tik Tok already (and only has a placeholder presence on the platform).
Well, one company’s loss is another company’s gain! Chick-Fil-A’s rival, Shake Shack, observed the last video from Miri and roped her in to promote their product!
Even here, Shake Shack played it very smartly. Chick-Fil-A outlets are famously closed on Sundays. It’s a company policy. Shake Shack roped Miri to post a video on a Sunday, promoting their Sunday menu!
I wonder how Chick-Fil-A’s PR team looks at their employee promoting a product from a rival fast-food chain. I also hope Miri gets to keep her job at Chick-Fil-A since employee rules around promoting a rival’s product may be a lot more harsh (understandably) than a mere word from the PR team.
This entire episode is a stupendous missed opportunity by Chick-Fil-A. I can understand if it was the early 2010s when companies were still grappling with social media. But we are in 2024!! And most organizations would jump up in joy if they discover an employee getting popular on the most popular social media channel posting their own company’s products. It would instantly be seen as marketing and PR goldmine.
What Chick-Fil-A’s PR team did, instead, is utterly baffling, defying conventional wisdom or common sense.