I’ve had a fun few weeks recently putting together a Digiterati Academy course and a masterclass comprised of social media #fails alongside guidance for social media policy development and staff training. There are a few screen grabs shared below.
The internet is awash with examples of corporate PR fails including the likes of Habitat, McDonalds, Qantas, Nokia, Ryanair, the NYPD and Home Depot but it was trickier to track down personal social media mishaps that went on to affect the individual’s job or employer.
With a bit of digging, however, I found the story of Justine Sacco, the PR executive fired over a racist tweet sent from her personal Twitter account, a British banker who lost his job over an online boast about a business deal, the Bank of Scotland boss who resigned following screen grabbed Snapchat pictures his daughter posted of their private conversation, several employees who tweeted personal and pretty offensive updates on their corporate accounts in error, a British woman sacked from her job after complaining on her personal Facebook Profile that her job was boring plus this woman who was fired from Cisco before she had even started work:
What I have done in our course appropriately named How not to £@%!-up on social media! is to showcase these case studies in a way that illustrates different aspects of online good and poor practice for both organisations and their staff.
I was pleased to discover the concept of the privacy paradox where people state that they have concerns about their privacy online but take no action to secure their accounts. They are willing to risk their privacy to reap the rewards of being active on social media (remember the Which Friends/Greece/Disney Character Are You? quizzes that brought the Cambridge Analytica data breach to public attention).
The full course is split into five modules and will take you about an hour and a half to complete. The idea is that you can use the course for your own personal development or for researching good practice, policy development or training for your marketing or wider staff teams. The course covers:
- Module 1 – What happens when corporate use of social media goes wrong
- Module 2 – Good practice for business use of social media
- Module 3 – What happens when personal use of social media goes wrong
- Module 4 – Good practice for personal use of social media
- Module 5 – Social media privacy settings
There is also a complementary Masterclass called How to develop a social media policy for your business or clients (we are so good at snappy titles…)
This looks at the arguments for having a social media policy and what they can achieve. We then unpack the twofold elements of a social media policy.
Using a wealth of examples from multiple sectors across the world we examine what you might want to include in a social media policy. Even the good old NHS has recognised the changing times in relation to the blurring of personal and social online networking:
How to access the new social media course and masterclass
How not to £@%!-up on social media! and How to develop a social media policy for your business or clients are available in the Digiterati Academy for one time purchase, or, to our AAA members, to stream. The cheapest way to access them is via our AAA (Access All Areas) membership. Info here.