Tue, Jun 2nd, 2009 by Mike Aleo
Social networks are embedded into our everyday lives. We plan our weekends around Facebook invitations. We learn a friend is having a baby through an update on Twitter. We learn about a co-worker’s promotion through their LinkedIn profile being updated. Like it or not, social networks have become a part of our daily interactions.
It’s all about being responsible for what you put out there for the world to see.
Many professionals I know have two Facebook accounts. One might be full of photos from their college spring breaks, with wall posts retelling embarrassments of the night before. This account often has a fake name, to disassociate their personal and professional lives. Through the second, work account, they might have a few photos, but its primary use is to share with co-workers, keeping potentially career-harming photos and information separate.
This balancing act is both smart and dangerous. On one hand, you’re keeping information your boss might not see favorably out of the (sort of) public eye, but if a co-worker going for the same promotion found some of those photos from Cozumel, they might find their way to the manager’s desk.
If you think things like this don’t happen—you’re wrong. In early 2009 Dan Leone, a part-time gate chief for the Philadelphia Eagles and avid Brian Dawkins fan, posted a negative Facebook message about the trading of his favorite player. He deleted the comment, but the team still fired him over the phone a few days later. The firing sparked discussions in the media about expectations of privacy from ESPN to CNN.
A North Carolina teacher was suspended in late 2008 after listing, “I am teaching in the most ghetto school in Charlotte” as her profession. The description was quickly changed, but the damage was done. The incident led to an investigation that eventually left four teachers being disciplined for messages and photos they had posted on Facebook. Her attorney stated, “Facebook pages are only meant to be viewed by people permitted to see them.” School district parents didn’t agree, and are calling for her permanent dismissal.
Perhaps the most well-known social networking snafu, a Vice President at public relations firm, Ketchum was on his way to give a presentation to 150 FedEx employees at their headquarters in Memphis, Tennessee. Upon arrival he posted a message to his personal Twitter account. “True confession but I’m in one of those towns where I scratch my head and say ‘I would die if I had to live here!’” In what followed, FedEx issued a statement staunchly defending its hometown, and Ketchum quickly issued an apology stating their pride in working with FedEx.
In the examples above there is an assumption that deleting status messages or tweets will protect you from their discovery. Enter Tweleted. Billed as a tool to “recover embarrassing deleted tweets for fun and profit,” it is a self-proclaimed “instant drama generator.” It searches the publicly served database of Tweets and cross-references it with the archived list of tweets associated with your account to show only those messages that you have deleted. Upon my discovery of the site, I promptly searched co-workers, friends and others I follow on Twitter, disappointingly finding only a few deleted spelling errors. The same holds true with Facebook status messages, which may be sent to mobile phones, and email. When you hit “send” you’re stuck with whatever message you sent, for better or worse.
One suggestion to avoid potential embarrassment is the conference call rule. If you want to be safe in posting anything to Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Twitter, or any other network, pretend you’re on a conference call with every member of your company (and all of your clients). Are you comfortable sharing whatever you want to say on this call? If not, it’s probably better left unsaid, untweeted, or unposted.
Social networking is a great avenue to define a persona for your business, create some marketing buzz, and communicate with your clients or users. But with the increased interactivity comes the risk of mistakes. It has become so easy to type in those 140 characters and hit “send” that sometimes we forget there is no “undo.”
The lessons are clear: no matter what your interpretation is of the privacy of your personal online personas, there is no asterisk-marked footnote claiming that these views are yours and not your employers. Even if there was, your boss, clients, co-workers and the public won’t see it that way. Likewise, if you are responsible for the social networking account associated with your organization, remember Ketchum, remember a billion-dollar NFL team cared what a part-time employee posted, and keep in mind that these socially-driven updates are the new age press release. Your actions are public and reflect the entire organization, so avoid becoming a victim of Tweleted and think before you answer the question, “What are you doing?”
Interested in finding out what 720 Strategies can do to ramp up your social presence? Contact our sales team today at 202.962.3955.
Mike has eight years of experience in web development and brings fluency in semantic XHTML, CSS, and W3C web standards to the SevenTwenty technology team. Prior to SevenTwenty Strategies, Mike was a web developer for numerous Civilian Agencies in the Federal Government.
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