stop social media firings
April 9, 2009
Last month, Dan Leone was fired for posting this on Facebook:
Dan is [expletive] devastated about Dawkins signing with Denver. . .Dam Eagles R Retarted!!
I’m sure we’ve also all heard of the Cisco Fatty. This was the story of an Epic Fail that never was, featuring a girl who posted on Twitter about a job she’d already turned down and an over-zealous Cisco channel partner who tweeted back… and the internet community went freakin nuts. As a result, this young lady had her face plastered all over the Internet.
There are countless other examples of people being fired for supposedly “stupid” social media mistakes. Shouldn’t all these people know better than to broadcast their dirty laundry to the rest of the world?
Hell no.
Where’s the outrage when someone gets fired because of Social Media?
Schadenfreude is nothing new. Making very public mistakes is reason enough for the public to point and laugh. Public humiliation is one thing, but losing your job over a bad Tweet, Facebook quote, or something embarrassing cached by Google Maps is entirely different.
It’s wrong.
Everybody makes mistakes – whether it’s that tattoo or the guy you dated last week or picking a bad movie for your third date. Blessedly, many of these mistakes have a very short shelf-life and are forgotten as soon as they happen. But social media mistakes – those live on forever. Not just because the tools we use enable people to find us much easier than in the past, but also because these tools have the implicit promise of privacy.
Sure, Facebook has amazing privacy controls, but you need a CIS Degree just to figure them out (luckily, I do). Regardless, Facebook promises that no one outside your network will be able to see your profile page. Does anyone older than 30 actually grasp what that means?
Twitter and Facebook both work on the principle of anonymity through numbers. That is, your voice is just a drop in the ocean. But as search engines cache more and more, and employers take advantage of unwitting employees who haven’t locked down their profiles, the principle of anonymity through numbers begins to falter.
I’m not saying there’s no reason to point and laugh when someone makes a bonehead move. That’s just human nature.
What I’m saying is, I don’t care if you call your boss a moron or if you say that your company is “retarted”. You’re entitled to your opinion – no matter how scathing it is. Never mind that these sorts of things were being said under the radar before… shared with friends, family, and anyone who would listen. Now we just use different tools to broadcast our displeasure.
When an employee is broadcasting displeasure to the world, the majority of the problem doesn’t exist with the employee. Aside from the “Hey, you know, you should really bring these things up internally,” talk, the blame rests squarely on the employer. When someone is telling everybody but the people they work for what’s wrong with their job, that’s the employer’s problem for not listening (or, more likely – for not taking appropriate action unless the problem is *very* public).
That these tools are increasingly public means that the complaint as well as the response are all in the public view. If your employee calls you out on a bonehead move, or is broadcasting to Twitter that their supervisor is an idiot, the problem becomes how to respond properly.
The fair response isn’t to fire the employee for dissent.
Instead, a level-handed approach should be taken. First, most of us don’t realize the impact our words will have – whether they’re spouted on the Internet or in-person. It’s only fair to give the employee a chance to defend their point and weigh the merit of the words. Second, that the employee cares enough to say something is an indicator of passion. Sure, plenty of people wig-out about the tiny things in life, but those things that really set us off are bound to be the ones we care the most about. Otherwise why bother?
Obviously Dan Leone had a point – otherwise Brian Dawkins wouldn’t have given him tickets to the Broncos-Eagles game. As Dawkins put it, “Had I not … signed with Denver, that guy would still have his job. That didn’t surprise me, that someone said that on their Facebook. It did surprise me that he was let go.”
Clearly Dawkins wasn’t at fault here – the Philadelphia Eagles were. Just like the Internet community at large was in the case of the Cisco Fatty.
Passionate, vocal, loud employees are every businesses’ best asset. Only through mismanaging them do they become nightmares.
Stop this stupid trend of social media firings. It discourages the use of technology and also encourages people to internalize their hurt feelings.
Shouldn’t we all be thankful that “going postal” has become a euphemism for mouthing off on Twitter instead of what it used to mean anyway?
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