Don't Fire An Employee And Leave Them In Charge Of The Corporate Twitter Account

Yesterday HMV, the beleaguered British entertainment retailer, laid off 190 employees, in an effort to cut costs and right its balance sheet. The company apparently pulled a large group into human resources and gave them the bad news. While this was going on, one employee, Poppy Rose, who had been an HMV community manager and thus had access to the corporate Twitter account, started live tweeting about the layoffs.

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• Good! I hate corporate wankers

  Fire%20the%20CEO

• Good for her! I don't see that she did anything wrong. As acknowledged in the article: when she was asked, she gave them control of the accounts. If they were too stupid to ask for that control before they fired her, that's their own damn fault. (When I first started in business I always thought the top execs were intelligent people who made good business decisions. I now know differently, and this incident is proof of that.) The one piece to the article that bothered me: [quote]What’s not clear is how her actions will affect her career in the future. It may be that no boss would want to hire an employee who would take actions that would so embarrass an employer. She didn't take actions as an employee to embarrass her employer. She took actions as an ex-employee to embarrass her former employer. Big difference.

• Poppy rulez

• r2 -- even mundane separations from a job are often viewed by companies as a bad divorce. With the employee as the villain.

• Wow, read the comments on that article. It's a cunt convention - Debbie M. Manager and Chad Sociopath love discussing ways to screw over their employees.

• I have admin access to our corporate Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google+ and other assorted accounts. I also have them for over 300 of our clients. It's unbelievable the amount of damage I could do in a very short time if I was pissed off enough.

• [quote]She didn't take actions as an employee to embarrass her employer. She took actions as an ex-employee to embarrass her former employer. Big difference. Don't kid yourself. No difference at all if you're the hiring manager. Would you put yourself on the line for somebody who may be a loose cannon? And Poppy does rule, bless her untamed by the corporate beast Millenial little heart. I FLOVED this one: We're Tweeting live from HR where we're all being fired! Exciting!!

• Poppy made those Gen X'ers and Baby Boomers look like fools. I think she's tremendous.

• HMV??? I didn't even know they were still around. I thought they went the way of the Virgin Megastore.

• HMV, that really brings back memories. I used to spend time in the one on Oxford. This goes all the way back to the 90s. It was a happy time and I wish I was young again.