Today's award goes to the management and administrators of HMV Group, the British music company. Forbes reports:
Yesterday HMV, the beleaguered British entertainment retailer, laid off 190 employees, in an effort to cut costs and right its balance sheet. The company apparently pulled a large group into human resources and gave them the bad news. While this was going on, one employee, Poppy Rose, who had been an HMV community manager and thus had access to the corporate Twitter account, started live tweeting about the layoffs.
Over a period of around 20 minutes, she sent out a series of notes expressing her rising sense of alarm to HMV’s 61,500 followers (that number has since risen to 73,350). Rose admitted that it was unusual to use the company Twitter feed to express her views, but, she wrote, “when the company you dearly love is being ruined,” she felt it was justified. “There are over 60 of us being fired at once!” she wrote. “Mass execution, of loyal employees who love the brand.”
One of the most entertaining tweets that came through before HMV took back the account and deleted the offending tweets: “Just overheard our marketing director (he’s staying, folks) ask ‘How do I shut down Twitter?’”
. . .
The rather obvious lesson for employers in all of this: Take control of your social media accounts, change the passwords, and restrict access before you let go of the employees who run those accounts.
As for Poppy Rose, it’s not clear how her actions will affect her career ... It may be that no boss would want to hire an employee who would take actions that would so embarrass an employer. On the other hand, Rose has made it clear she understands the power of social media and how to wield it, a skill that many employers value.
There's more at the link, including a screen capture of some of her Twitter messages.
*Facepalm*
How on earth could someone be so ignorant, or stupid, or careless, as to fail to shut down the social media accounts before firing the person responsible for updating them? Surely that person should also be fired?
Peter
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