The era of influencer employees, the hidden treasure of brands

The monitoring of the IULM

“From our continuous monitoring – adds Mazzei – it emerged that this communication has become more concrete, showing immediate utility, more timely to respond to needs, more authentic because there was no space for celebratory and ritual communication, more consistent with external communication blurring the differences. These characteristics are the sign of a path towards the consolidation of the internal communication function and towards the affirmation of its strategic role. The partial or total return – again analyzes the director of the Observatory which brings together about fifteen of the major Italian realities (Campari, Cromology, E.ON, Edison, Eni, Unipol, MM, Sanofi, Sella, Snam, Takeda, Unicoop, Vodafone and Whirlpool) – is bringing out the worksphere, a work environment supported by digital technologies. In this context, active participation is crucial for the stability of the system because more technology requires a relational fabric and widespread involvement ».

Strong credibility crisis

«The official sources of communication – warns Mazzei – are suffering from a strong crisis of credibility. The official voice of companies remains very important, but it is crucial that the entire system makes its voice heard, especially by enhancing the channel of interpersonal communication networks. The internal ambassadors value all the potential of personal communication: the capillarity, the credibility of the testimony in the first person, the creation of engagement in those who are directly involved ».

On the other hand, if formal organization is the skeleton, informality is that central nervous system that guides the collective thought processes, actions and reactions of its business units: so wrote David Krackhardt and John Edwin Hanson of Carnegie Mellon University.

The side effects

But be careful. Every rose (even on social networks) has its thorns. So internal influencers can even sabotage organizations by formally undermining them. “They can add complexity and, if they decide to leave, cause a hard-to-manage snowball effect,” says Alex Bourgeois, one of the first internal marketing-oriented bloggers.

Then there is another relevant phenomenon. And it is linked to external influencers entering companies. It is these days the divorce between Adidas and Kanye known as Ye, entered the payroll of the sportswear brand as a designer and sent away after his anti-Semitic comments. «The method adopted to identify ambassadors is important: they can be volunteers or be identified and invited by the company.