Reference no: EM133147885

Closing Case Should Employers Restrict Social Media Use?

Just one Tweet, photo, e-mail, video, or post on Facebook can permanently damage a person's reputation and cause significant loss to companies and their investors. At a Domino's pizza store, one employee filmed another doing unappetizing things to food that was intended for a customer, then posted the video on YouTube. Domino's stock quickly plummeted by 10 percent.

Social media is powerful, and it's important to understand the repercussions before making a hasty comment one might later regret. Even a one-sentence post made on Facebook can cause an employee to be fired. Roy Rhone, Jr., a Frito-Lay warehouse employee, was fired after writing on Facebook he was "a hair away from setting it off in that b-."* Since facial expressions, gestures, and tone of voice are absent from social media posts, there is a risk that a message could be misunderstood. During the Arab Spring uprising in Egypt in 2011, Kenneth Cole posted, "Millions are in uproar in #Cairo. Rumor is they heard our new spring collection is now available online at [link]-KC." The humor was lost, and the company had to deal with its own uproar against the brand as angry consumers responded with "#boycottKennethCole."

Companies want to know what their customers and employees are saying about them, so as the popularity of social media has skyrocketed, so has the number of social media monitoring tools. Some search tools like Google Alerts are easy to use, free, and available to anyone. Simply enter a name, company, or topic and you can receive daily alerts about the search term. Other social media monitoring tools like Radian6 and Hearsay are robust, scouring the Internet deep and wide to find what people are saying and report the status of their social reputation score.

Some business leaders who think little is being said about their companies are surprised to learn how much is actually being said. When one big company made this claim, Hearsay CEO Clara Shih said the tool turned up an astonishing 60,000 different social media pages where employees mentioned or discussed company matters (not including the thousands of employee profiles on LinkedIn).* Yes, Big Brother is not restricted to government; it has spread to corporate environments, too.

1. Imagine you are the CEO of your own company and answer the following questions:

What policies, if any, would you put in place for employees using social media? Defend your reasons, pro or con.

If an employee makes disparaging comments on her Facebook page about the company, should she be fired?