The issue of whether you should or should not promote your company/agency and who ‘owns’ your content/connections is becoming a big one, there are a couple of interesting posts on this subject:

Bruce Clay – Who Owns What on the Web?

Duct Tape Marketing on Social Media Non-Complete

Ultimately (one would hope) your company will come to realise the value of any work you’ve done off your own bat and recognise that networking online is just as valuable as offline.

When I used to work for a company, I worked on my personal brand but would still reference Acro Media and use their link on my social media profiles. Having their link on my profiles drove traffic to their site.

The thing is, now that I have my own work-in-progress site, I would probably use that as my link instead of Acro’s if I still worked for them. They paid me as an internet marketer, but they didn’t provide me with hourly tasks to promote them via social media (although I suggested it time and again).

Ultimately it is something that should be discussed at the beginning of the working relationship. If a employer would like to pay an employee to promote themselves via their company and social media then they should do so. If an employee offers their services this way and they are turned down, than there should be nothing stopping the employee from continuing their self promotion (on their own time of course).

It’s true that common goals are key – if you end up with people constantly trying to further purely their own ends then you don’t have a team to begin with. When everyone is united by their love of SEO (or design, or development) however, it can only be a good thing to have a mix of both.

What we sell are our people and in the same way a business wants to promote its product, our people are our product and so naturally we should promote them and allow them to self promote. However, an agency is greater than the sum of its parts and individual staff members need to make sure they remember they are part of a team and promoting the common cuase comes first. To forget this is to risk being seen as arrogant and self serving, and resentment builds from other less extrovert team members which ultimately risks undermining the team spirit that is so important in an agency.

it isnt just bosses that want to make sure self promotion benefits the agency first and foremost, it is just as important to peers!