#employee separation

[sonalchawhan]

[sanjeevhimachali]

Performance Improvement Plan [PIP] – Genuine Chance OR Psychological Termination?  Is it PIP or another way to tell an employee RIP?

[sanjeevhimachali]

Why Rohan was fired?

[stacyjackson]

Social Media & Employee Separation--Are You Prepared?

As a social media marketer whose job was recently eliminated after my former employer was acquired by another organization, I got firsthand understanding of how much potential risk a company puts itself in when it comes to social media and employee separation.  

The day following my layoff, I contacted the company with all the social media credentials, how to access them, etc., and let them know who else had access.  There was no brain drain done on me or my direct report, who was also terminated--we had the keys to the communication kingdom, and nobody knew.  Had others with less integrity had access to these social media personas and been terminated, who knows what kind of things could have been done or said to the company's customers and prospects.

Take Steps to Minimize Social Media Risk With Regard to Employee Separation

Know who is managing your company's social media profiles. Sounds obvious, right?  Maybe your organization has recently acquired another company or been acquired by another company.  Gets a little fuzzier then.  Take inventory of all the social media profiles:

What are the user names and passwords?  

Who has access to them?

How do they access them?  Are multiple users accessing a corporate account via Hootsuite or CoTweet?  If so, do you have all those user names and passwords?

Are your Facebook Fan Pages managed by a single admin's profile linked to his or her personal account?  You aren't supposed to have duplicate user accounts, so it's likely tied to an individual's personal profile.  

Whose account in LinkedIn is your discussion group tied to and controlled by?

Know how content is getting on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. Another seemingly obvious answer.  But is it?  You can set up RSS feeds from many places to auto-tweet and auto-populate your social media profiles.  

Where are those feeds coming from?

Who is behind the content?

How do you stop the content from posting if it's being written by a disgruntled former employee?

Know whom to keep and whom to cut. If you have to make the tough decision to layoff individuals and you want to continue to maintain momentum with a thriving social media presence, make a realistic assessment of your staff before making the cuts.

Who truly understands your industry?

Who has the most background on your company?

Who has an authentic social media "personality" to engender and maintain connections?

Who knows the difference between building relationships and shoving out marketing speak? 

Social media marketing is still in its infancy in many ways, and these are the learning curves organizations go through.  Just think of social media as any other communication medium you would use:  you take steps to ensure your terminated employees can't use their company email addresses, can't access the website content management system.  Make sure they can't damage your reputation either through sloppy social media security measures.