Some tihngs I was reminded about...

Yesterday, I was part of a presentation at NTEN's 501Tech NY monthly gathering. It was an interesting gathering with some good give and take, and I learned a lot from listening to what people had to say. One exchange, in particular reinforced some lessons that I think are really important (and not all of them are technological.)

One person brought up a situation that her organization had just encountered and wanted some thoughts on the matter. A young woman in her organization had been spending a huge amount of time during work hours tweeting very negative things about the organization. It was bed enough that she was fired. What could we offer her in the way of insight?

Nick Pytel, the other presenter, started off with some good advice on how to control access to various web sites on work computers. "Oh, but she wasn't using a computer - she was using her smart phone." And, whose smart phone was she using? Hers. At that point Nick pointed out that there weren't any good technological solutions. In fact, there probably aren't any (legal) technological solutions.

Takeaway: Technological controls on technology generally make sense, when sensibly used, but there are limits to what you can do.

I wanted to discuss that point. I said "Where was her supervisor. Who was her supervisor?" The questioner responded "Me".

Laughter.

OOPS.

At least the laughter was friendly. And it was directed at me, rather than the questioner. Which was fine - she didn't deserve that; I did. Although that's not what I intended, I implied that the supervisor had not been doing her job. That's not a very effective way to move a discussion along.

Takeaway: Be very careful about using one liners and quips to make nuanced points.

How did they discover the problem? The young woman developed an attitude that she showed at work. And, her work started suffering as well. Those were clues that led them to look for, and find her tweets. (They weren't looking for tweets in particular, but they were looking for on-line activity.)

Takeaway: "Old fashioned" people management still works! As noted, there was no way internal technical controls could have prevented, or even caught, the problem. But, paying attention and making reasonable deductions from the clues you get, did catch the problem.

Takeaway: No matter what you do, you can't ignore social media anymore. You may not have an organizational social media presence, and you may decide to just ban the sites from work (often not a terribly good idea.) But, that won't keep you from being mentioned on social media. It will just mean that if you do get mentioned, you won't have any control. So, as an organization, you need to get savvy about social media, and make sure that someone is keeping an eye on your internet presence.