| Website | https://mypost.to |
| Bluesky | https://bsky.app/profile/mypost.to |
| Flipboard Social | https://flipboard.social/@mypost2 |
<p><p>The Mandai Wildlife Reserve, a tourist park in Singapore, posted a video late last year that became a viral hit: two of its millennial-age employees, wearing staff uniforms, described the park using Generation Z lingo. “Pop off, queen,” one of them dryly intones. “Slay,” says another.</p></p><p><p>“We let our Gen Z intern write the marketing script,” was the video’s headline — which quickly became a meme across social media, with dozens of brands offering their own spin.</p></p><p><p>The trend was part of a broader movement within marketing.</p></p><p><p>First companies paid social media influencers to hawk their products. Now, they’re turning inward: It’s not just social media interns popping up all over corporate social media — it’s employees with all sorts of jobs, who have been tapped by their employers, sometimes through formal programs, to help build the brand.</p></p> <p><p>On Lego’s official TikTok page, its designers explain their process. An Instagram page run by Delta Air Lines called “Life at Delta” features aviation maintenance technicians running through their daily routines and groups of employees dancing to trending audio clips. Portillo’s, the Chicago-based fast food chain, recently announced that it was creating an internal influencer program designed to grow employee followings on their own accounts.</p></p><p><p>Though the program is still new, Portillo’s has said it would like to have an internal influencer working at every location.</p></p><p><p>Employees “are among the most-trusted sources” for consumers, said Lachlan Williams, a brand strategist in Britain, because “they’re real people with insider knowledge.” Companies have been leveraging that credibility for decades, for example by using sales clerks as company ambassadors.</p></p><p><p>But only in recent years has the strategy started leaking onto social media, with many brands seeing it as cheaper and more efficient than using outside insiders, Williams said.</p></p><p><p>Some companies are extending the strategy to employees’ personal accounts. While it’s become common for employees to star on in-house brand channels, a handful of companies are giving them more creative control. For example, DHL encourages couriers to record themselves on their routes while responding to prompts and to post the videos to their own accounts with the hashtag #YellowUnited. It then highlights some of those videos on the corporate brand page.</p></p><p><p>The company offers courses on how to create compelling posts and increase audience engagement to its couriers. Similar programs exist at Nordstrom, Adobe and Dell.</p></p><p><p>Most internal influencers aren’t paid extra for their appearances on social media. However, Williams said more companies are “recognizing that this is additional work, and compensating accordingly.” That might mean a bonus, a pay bump, special access or a free product.</p></p><p><p>Controlling the message can be challenging. Employee-focused content, especially when it is posted directly to employee accounts, tends to be spontaneous and off-the-cuff, which is what makes it so appealingly authentic. But that spontaneity can conflict with the careful messaging intended by the brand. An Instagram Reel about vintage Lego sets, for example, might clash with a strategic focus on up-and-coming designs.</p></p><p><p>“If you let employees just communicate whatever they want, they’ll do whatever it is that interests them,” Williams said. “Sometimes that will align with the business’s strategic objectives, but a lot of the time it won’t — and sometimes it may even pull against them.”</p></p><p><p>“It’s a balance,” said Chelsea Thompson-O’Brien, a vice president of customer experience strategy at the marketing agency VML, about how much companies should vet employee influencer content. “If you’re too strict, the content itself becomes wallpaper; if you’re too loose, your brand could suffer in the process.”</p></p><p><p>Thompson-O’Brien said that the ideal scenario was to have several people approve content, “but not so many that you forget why you even wanted to share to begin with.”</p></p><p><p>Balazs Balogh, an in-house content creator on DHL’s global social media team, said that the creative process depends partly on the topic. “For topics like HR and sustainability, we align on the core message but have the freedom to bring those stories to life in our own way,” he said. More generic or evergreen topics require even less planning and oversight.</p></p><p><p>Could it backfire? If employees aren’t genuinely enthusiastic, it might, Williams said, adding, “When employee stories don’t match the marketing, it creates dissonance.”</p></p><p><p>Thompson-O’Brien said using employees as influencers is particularly useful in areas “where the employer brand reputation and overall employee satisfaction have a major impact on the brand perception.” But putting marketing in employees hands also increases the need for those boxes to be checked.</p></p><p><p>This article originally appeared in <a href='https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/25/business/dealbook/employee-social-media-influencers.html'>The New York Times</a>.</p></p>
