Do You Really Think You Don't Need to Monitor Outbound Content?

By Michael Osterman
in

Electronic communications is a two-way street:  With the right tools one can illuminate the world with words of wisdom and insight. Alternatively, one can demonstrate why the most powerful communication tool they should be given is a crayon.

What reminded me of this was two things:

  • We received an email this morning from someone who signed up to be on our survey panel 13 months ago.  As we do with everyone who signs up for the panel and provides us with a corporate email address, we send an email to verify their identity. We received it and added him to the panel in November 2010.  This morning, in response to a mailing, he replied “That’s nice…I don’t give a ****.”
  • Also today, there is an article about three staffers who worked in the office of a Washington-state US representative. These staffers, probably not intending to get fired, did just that via Twitter. Among their less-than-wise posts were “Dear taxpayers—I hope you don’t mind that I’m watching YouTube clips of Nirvana at my government job. Thanks, you’re the best”, and “I really like DC, but I could have used another day away. The silver lining is that I don’t have to see my idiot boss.”

Two really important lessons here, one for employees and one for employers:

  • Employees: Your electronic words exist forever on tape, in archives, in inboxes and, in the case of tweets, in the Library of Congress. They might come back to haunt you and, if they’re egregious enough, probably will as in the case of the Congressional staffers who were fired 70 minutes after their conduct was discovered.
  • Employers: Monitor what your employees are saying via Twitter, email, etc. A failure to do so can damage your corporate reputation, result in legal or regulatory sanctions, reduce your revenue, and leave you wishing you had deployed monitoring technology that is probably less expensive than you think.
Published December 8, 2011