Scary story out of SMU.
A professor who kept an annonymous blog about her experiences on campus was let go - the school says it wasn't about the blog, she says it was.
Either way, she's been canned.
Makes for some scary thoughts - what if an employer finds out you've said something about them, and fires you for... "not fitting the corporate culture?"
With IBM and a ton of other companies promoting employee blogging, my bet is we haven't yet seen the last of this - in fact, I'm betting there will be a court case before too long - someone gets fired, blames it on their blog, screams first ammendment, and it's a court case.
Anyone agree?
Story here, from the Houston Chronicle.
Not the first time this has happened. Someone from Google and Michael Hanscom (sp?) from Microsoft got canned for things they posted on their personal blogs. Other than whistle-blowing, you don't have freedom of speech surrounding work - and firms can even fire you for things unrelated to work you post on your personal pages, because it reflects poorly on them.
Mind you, Hanscom posted pictures of Apple G5s being delivered to an MS loading dock (not much of a secret, really - G5s were visible, behind an enclosure, driving some of the hoopla surrounding the Xbox 360 launch at E3).
Posted by: Eric Sohn | May 30, 2005 at 10:40
Most companies have a quirky dislike of having employees badmouth or embarrass them in public. Go figure.
Posted by: Dick Weltz | May 30, 2005 at 13:09
Then explain IBM and other companies encouraging their employees not only to blog, but blog actively, Dick...
Posted by: Peter | May 30, 2005 at 13:12
This story caught my eye when I saw it first on D Magazine's blog. This professor has since cleaned up her site, the site you and I can see has been totally stripped down of the truly horrible things she was saying about her students and her co-workers.
So how does a company protect themselves in a blog, through their company handbooks? How does a company encourage safe blogging. One would have to think that companies encouraging blogging must have some "guiding principles"
And what makes a good blogger once he leaves a particular company. Would Andy Lark (who I know and adore) be as successful as he is if he had turned his blog into a bashing of Sun or Nortel? Sure, it's fun to read a blog that bashes someone, but do you take a lot of stock in it -has the blogger earned the respect of the reader?
Posted by: Serena | May 31, 2005 at 00:26
>>
Then explain IBM and other companies encouraging their employees not only to blog, but blog actively, Dick...
Posted by: Peter | May 30, 2005 01:12 PM
<<
(a) Could be that certain types of postings would not be welcomed nevertheless, or
(b) IBM has made another dumb decision, along with all those others that have reduced its position, prestige, and market value from what they once were.
Why would ANY company appreciate its employees denigrating it in public?
Posted by: Dick Weltz | May 31, 2005 at 10:17
As a former student of Ms. Liner at SMU and a PR rookie, I have to say that while she was a wonderful teacher (of a Media Ethics class ironically) she wrote some terrible things about her students and colleagues. Like Serena said, she has cleaned up the postings now that she has attention from the press and a pending book deal. A lot of her stories are exaggerations and caricatures of the people she encountered while at SMU. My question is, what does SMU do at this point to handle the publicity she and her blog are getting? Perhaps my former department, Corporate Communications and Public Affairs, should have known to handle this better? How so?
Posted by: Angela Jones | May 31, 2005 at 12:25