Being Paid To Participate? What Are your Employees Doing In Social Media?

I wanted to just chime in on a post I was reading by Peter Kim and instead of hijacking his comment section I thought I would just jot down the thought I had when his post entitled "Should you be paid to participate in social media?" made me shout, "YES!"

"I would venture to guess that with 250 million people on Facebook there might be a few people talking about their jobs and where they work."

I know Peter was talking about your employees, but in our case we provide the person to handle your social media needs and therefore, we like to get paid.  It’s part of our business plan right under what we do.  This does make me think about social media as a service.  Many employees are doing what we outsource.  This is probably not a good post to be jotting down now that I think about it, but I wonder how many employees are participating in social media yet are not only not getting paid for it, but their employees have no idea that it is even taking place?  I have been saying this is the year of listening and I wonder how many employers are out there listening and stumble upon one of their own out and about evangelizing for the company? I would venture to guess that with 250 million people on Facebook there might be a few people talking about their jobs and where they work.  Is that on the clock time?  This is what spurred me to think of this post.  We get paid to post on various social networking sites on behalf of companies as their social media evangelist.  They may be getting this service free from their own.  How about your employees are they talking about you?  This appears to be another sub-heading in the year of listening thesis I seem to be writing in my head.

Tags: Peter Kim, Social Media, Pay For Blogging, Social Media Salary