Ya Done Good Son.

You started out years ago as a newbie online marketer. Over the last decade or so, you’ve pulled off some amazing things with viral marketing campaigns, banner ad placements, eCommerce, and  some huge partner promotions/campaigns leveraging everything under the sun effectively without spending hardly a dime and the revenue is rolling in. Your shrewd sense of where things are going next in the online marketing world has set you apart from your co-workers and your equivalents at other companies.

Your marketing cunning has been noted by journalists abroad and you’ve even done a few high-profile keynotes and panels. You’ve written for a couple well-known print publications with huge distribution as a guest columnist. You feel the momentum of your career getting more intense and gaining the kind of thrust you had always hoped it would finally get. Finally it is happening.

Then one year, the Social Media ship lands and an outpouring of tools and websites floods the online world. You quickly understand these new concepts, embrace them, become a master at manipulating them to sculpt yours and your company’s future and now you are right smack in the middle of the new era and excited about it.

After a couple more years of plugging away, you are a Social Media expert. A new opportunity arises. You get hired to do a job at a big company. You were hired under the assumption that you would be a bad ass at it because being a bad ass at it is what will make your employer happy by making them money. They will make money as a result of your genius strategy for garnering more social capital than their competitors could ever imagine. People are following you and the company that hired you on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and are engaged.

As doors start opening for you within the social media community, your frame of reference and circle of professional cohorts expands exponentially.

The Corporate Debacle

What should your company do with you when you actually become the bad ass they always wanted you to be? When directors and VP’s, who are also smart career opportunists like you, know that your success brings opportunity not just for their company, but for you personally as well? Should they be threatened by that? Should they embrace it? Should they be happy or annoyed with you that your blog has taken off, your Twitter following is through the roof quadrupling the company’s, and you are getting talked about in social media almost as much as your company is?

Due to the nature of social media if you are active, excellent at what you do, and involved in the communities, you meet LOTS of people, constantly and instantly. All the boundaries have lifted, the shackles of long distances geographically have been removed. We can find ‘like’ people right NOW. These people are from all over the world, many of them are smart as hell and respected in their industry and career space. There are so many benefits for your company as you mix it up on behalf of <COMPANY NAME>, getting involved, and being an evangelist for your company. Before you know it, the same amount of people are asking you about you as they are about your company.

A recent article from Sage Circle entitled, “Forrester tells analysts no more personal blogs with interesting implications for analyst relations” discusses how Forrester management had requested that all of their analysts shut down all of their own personal blogs. Forrester CEO George Colony was all down for non-competes that favored the employer because  “… non-competes ultimately help new and established companies alike to retain the talent they’ve invested in, further nurtured and who have become star employees due to their rewarding tenure and success. …”.

Where do you draw the line though? How can you justify keeping your SM expert at bay BECAUSE they did such an amazing job and are naturals at what they do? You can’t tell a Social Media expert to not be social. You can’t tell an opportunist to not seize the best opportunities. Anyone with even a hair of ambition knows this.

My recommendation on how companies should handle this is to recognize their Social Media expert’s success. Stay close to them and help them facilitate their career growth. Like any role anywhere, if a company supports the growth of an outstanding employee, statistics have shown they will be loyal and stick with their company longer as well and will continue to be in good standing after an eventual split if it happens. Invest in the relationship with your SM rockstar and it will pay your company back in the short and long term, regardless if they end up working for you or not.

Just remember that a star can’t make you shine if you keep it in a box.