I've known Sean Williams for about a decade. He is a straight-laced corporate communicator from Cleveland. He has worked for Goodyear and National City Bank, and is now starting his own consultancy.
He's a fine writer, he understands communication theory, he believes in measuring outcomes, and somehow he also has a sense of humor.
In short, he's true blue and blue chip.
And this morning, he is a victim—a decidedly innocent victim of a vicious and utterly unfair attack, by none other than PR villain Amanda Chapel.
You'll read Williams' account if you give a rat's ass about Twitter and the dangers of the anonymity the Internet affords would-be character assassins, or wonder how you'd behave if you felt, as Williams told me this morning, "the sense of helplessness" that comes from "sticking your toe into the waters of social media and getting a bite out of your leg."
Wow! I mean, Wow!!
This is really scary, because there really ISN’T a way to anticipate and avoid what happened in this instance, since it was NOT really Sean Williams involved.
And this isn’t just a cautionary tale for the self-employed small-business owner either. Many, many corporate environments have “morals clauses” or “Code of Conduct policies” which allow the company to discipline or even terminate your employment for certain behaviours.
I’ve never been a real fan of Twitter, and this won’t encourage me to go further into the Twitterverse, but this same situation could happen to one on any blog, website or other social media site so Twitter isn’t necessarily the bad guy here.
I think this is another reminder that that tired old saw: “Anything you put in writing, be it an email, a blog or Facebook, should be written as though it’s going to appear on the front page of the New York Times.” is still a good way to approach things for our own protection.
All it says to me is don’t believe everything you read. Always good advice.
Isn’t the correct way to handle such flareups to contact the person directly and work it out (at which point they can says, “Er, I was just out trimming hedges . . .” I’d rather assume good faith than flame out publicly with an unconfirmed.