Very interesting point. I think the employees posting is a bit of a curveball, and it will be interesting to see in the years that come how companies deal with the increasing public transparency of their employees.

Rather than policing directly, it may lie somewhere in the same solution I’d suggest to dealing with brand haters. Basically, if people are likely to talk negatively about your brand in any public space, short of the ideal solution of fixing why they are talking negatively about you in the first place, the next best solution is to try and contribute something positive yourself to the mix to help balance things out.

This is not to say brands should be spamming social spaces, as that’s obviously adding fuel to the fire. But as an easy example, GM proactively mobilizing their Flickr audience to post photos of cars and tag them, and GM doing this themselves via the photostream, helps ensure that searches for GM are going to result in mostly a lot of cool car photos.

Want a tough challenge though and a good example of a brand with an image problem on Flickr? Try searching for “Microsoft”:
http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=microsoft&w=all