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Introduction
Nowadays social media influencers face challenges to their authenticity (Audrezet et al., 2018), with a lack of sincerity, transparency and truthfulness (Lee and Eastin, 2021) that leads to a decrease of trust both by companies who may use them as advocates and from their followers. At the same time, employees’ roles as influencers have risen (Andersson, 2019). The Edelman Trust Barometer (2020) finds that employees are rated as a credible source by 54% of respondents, higher than journalists who score just 36%. Employees’ as social media influencers is a topic of interest because they play various roles as online advocates, ambassadors and informal spokespersons (van Zoonen et al., 2016; Warburton and Troester, 1997). Employee influencer voices are proven in building a company’s reputation, image and brand (Ruck et al., 2017).
Since 2018, the government in Indonesia has had an objective to recruit 3,000 social media employee influencers from Millennials via its “Millenial Program”. These employee influencers are expected to attract followers from the public with the aim of socializing and promoting the corporate brands, products and services of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) to broader audiences. Those who become employee influencers do not necessarily have to have the largest number of followers; most important is that they should be influential in social media (Peters et al., 2013).
Prior research has discussed the importance of organizations guiding employee influencers and putting in place a governance system to support, and to an extent, control them (Andersson, 2019). Since the flow of information in a company is dynamic, employee advocates need advice in terms of social media utilization on behalf of their organizations (van Zoonen et al., 2016). The factors to be considered in employee social media governance and to generate employee advocates have already been identified, for instance, favorable organization–employee relationships generally, authentic communication practices, commitment and leadership, good relationships with employee advocates and motivation (van den Berg and Verhoeven, 2015; Dreher, 2014; Koporcic and Halinen, 2018; Linke and Zerfass, 2012).
Accordingly, the purpose of this research is to examine how employee influencers are selected and “managed” by their SOE, including what support they need from their employers. The research proposes practical actions and a theoretical model of employee influencer management that adds...