At the beginning of the pandemic, corporate privacy lawyer Cece Xie found herself in an unexpected position when her first TikTok went viral. The video was a meme comparing her relentless work pace to that of her friends, who were working in marketing and having, as she remembered it, “a lot of happy hours.” She began accruing a large number of followers who started asking her questions about her life and her job.
TikTok easily makes influencers out of everyone from lawyers like Xie to people who are just really good at using Microsoft Excel. As a privacy lawyer-slash-rising TikTok influencer, Xie was on corporate America’s new frontier, where employees even in the most conservative-sounding office jobs can leverage their expertise and a knack for content creation to paid influencing opportunities. Managers must now increasingly figure out what social media policies make sense for this slash-influencer class, which seems to largely expect these pursuits to be allowed.
Xie didn’t just take her TikTok traction and run with it. Before she began posting a lot, she consulted her firm’s social media policy and met with one of its social media coordinators. The firm unsurprisingly didn’t want her posting any confidential information, but also advised her not to post at certain times of day that could indicate if she was or wasn’t in a meeting. Xie said, “This is the part I did appreciate about my law firm—they did not want to stifle what the lawyer as an individual said. So it...
Ryan Amacher, who played role in bid to damage campaign, has also made antisemitic and racist posts on social media An influencer who played a key role in hoax claims that James Talarico was in a ...