When Social Networking Goes Bad

Have you ever had one of those days when you accidentally send an email that one was only supposed to go to one person and contained either personal or business classified information, but end up sending it to a giant list? Or you forget to "bcc" everyone? Worse yet, you send a private email, but it ends up being spread all over the internet (a story of a law student applying to Harvard comes to mind...needless to say, that student did not get into Harvard or any other law school for that matter)? Well, one of the people I follow on twitter sent along the story of James Andrews, someone who considers himself a "key influencer" who did something along those lines.

It’s a story about a PR account executive/vice president named James Andrews from Ketchum in Atlanta who flew to Memphis to visit FedEx, one of the agency’s biggest clients. Andrews’ mission was to — now, this is important — talk with the corporate communications people at FedEx about social media.

Upon landing in Memphis, Andrews posted this message on the popular social media, mini-blogging service, Twitter, that’s widely followed by business people worldwide:

“True confession but I’m in one of those towns where I scratch my head and say, ‘I would die if I had to live here.’”

Andrews openly used his Twitter monicker - @keyinfluencer.

Someone inside FedEx was following Andrews, and that person shared the post among the top executives at the FedEx front office, and the company’s corporate communications staff. At that point, a person in the FedEx corporate communications staff apparently took umbrage to the post by Andrews and responded with this personal message to Mr. “KeyInfluencer:”

You'll have to read the article to see what the FedEx Communications person wrote. But suffice it to say, Mr. Andrews didn't make the presentation.

James Andrews is (or was?) an account executive for Ketchem. Based on Mr. Andrews complete lack of judgment, the article then rightly questions what this guy actually knows. Then again, we all need to keep in mind what exactly we write when using something as simple and impersonal, or sometimes very persona,l as facebook or twitter. A few years back I remember reading in the L.A. Times about how colleges and employers were using MySpace to figure out if they wanted to accept a potential student or a hire a potential employee. So just a word of warning, sometimes an innocent comment made by you, may not be so innocent to a potential client or employer.