[font=Arial,sans-serif]When Bosses & Blogs collide
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This article originally appeared at:
https://www.newsday.com/business/ny-bzcov284399738aug28,0,6200459.story [/font]
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Venting online about your job - even anonymously - can get you fired
BY RICHARD J. DALTON JR
STAFF WRITER
August 28, 2005
Heather B. Armstrong disdained her "insane" coworkers, so she vented online - an act that led her to the unemployment line.
Amy Norah Burch, an undergraduate coordinator at Harvard University, ranted online about her displeasure, saying she felt like bombing the campus and shooting students and faculty members. She merely considered the blog entries as a way to let off steam. Harvard didn't see it that way.
Peter Whitney despised his boss. His mistake was writing about his contempt in his online journal.
These bloggers are among dozens in recent years who have been given the pink slip for blog-blabbing about bosses, their colleagues or their companies, or for using their employers' computers and Internet access to maintain their blogs, according to Curt Hopkins, who compiles the firings on his blog, Morphe metales.blogspot.com.
"Here we have a brand-new technology that is so much different from a lot of communication technologies," Hopkins said. "It's really easy to use. It's really tempting to use. And it makes you believe in a lot of cases that you're not really communicating with anybody at the same time you're communicating with thousands of people."
Fame or misfortune
Although people have always grumbled about their job in the company lunchroom or at the dinner table at home, this high-tech version of the office water cooler can make people famous - or jobless.
"Some people become rock stars, and other people get fired," said Steve Rubel, a public relations strategist who helps clients use blogs for marketing.
The job losses are a sobering wake-up call about just how little privacy and anonymity exists in the online universe. In some cases, bosses have confronted the bloggers with lengthy logs of every time the writers went to their Web sites.
The episodes also point to a need for companies to develop policies on blogging, Rubel said. Only 23 percent of companies surveyed by the American Management Association reported having written policies about blogging, compared with 84 percent that have established e-mail policies.
And the incidents are reminders that employees who aren't covered by union contracts or employment agreements have little job protection. Most states allow companies to fire employees for any reason or no reason at all, with a few exceptions.
"An employee who sits down at their blog and starts bad-mouthing their employer, casting them in ill light, and talking about things that the employee doesn't like about the employer's practices and such has a death wish," said Barbara Roth, a partner at Torys LLP, a labor law firm in New York. "It's hard to think of a good reason to do that, particularly where you have an employer that has complaint procedures."
Most bloggers apparently thought they were insulated, because they never envisioned that executives would discover their online journals; they say they figured only their friends would read it.
Bloggers interviewed for this story said they wrote anonymously, and some said they never identified their company or co-workers. Some made the mistake of using company computers to write their journals.
"Workplace drama like this is not an uncommon thing," said Karsh, the author of black gayblogger.com, who asked that only his first name be used. "The only reason people blog about it is because if they didn't, they would go crazy."
Anonymity no guarantee
But the miscalculation that their writing would escape the eyes of their bosses led bloggers to lose jobs they held for years, or sometimes just weeks, at well-known companies such as Google and lesser-known businesses such as autotrader .com.
Much of the material on the blogs merely recounted the routine activities of the writers' daily lives, such as grocery shopping, with just a portion dealing with their jobs. But the small amount of workplace insults, such as calling a boss an "ice princess," rattled the nerves of bosses.
Bloggers can protect themselves, though, by taking a few steps to remain anonymous. But that's not always easy. Armstrong, 30, of Salt Lake City, thought she was hiding her identity and that of her company, whose name she still doesn't reveal. She merely turned to her online journal to escape what she characterized as her miserable existence at a Los Angeles software company, she said - not to defile the company's reputation.
"I had no malicious intentions whatsoever," she said. "I was honestly just trying to be funny."
But, she said, someone found out about her Web site and e-mailed executives at the company.
Like the other fired bloggers, she remembers the exact date of her workplace demise. On Feb. 26, 2002, the company fired her. She believes she was among the first casualties of workplace blogging, and Hopkins, who monitors such events, agrees.
"I felt extremely alone because no one had gone through this before," Armstrong said.
Her firing led her to coin the term "dooced," after her blog dooce.com and as a variation on "dude"; the word has since entered the lexicon. To be "dooced," according to Urban dictionary.com, means "getting fired because of something that you wrote in your weblog."
Blogging on the clock
Anonymity also failed to protect Karsh because he made one big mistake: He accessed the blog from work, and executives confronted him with logs of every time he visited the site.
The executives told Karsh to take the site down and apologize to colleagues he had written about and told him he wouldn't be eligible for bonuses or promotions, Karsh said.
So he quit.
Threatening words
Rather than quit a job that sometimes infuriated her, Burch, 32, of Allston, Mass., registered her complaints online amid a blog mostly about such mundane topics as her grocery purchases or obscure bands.
But a couple of entries caught the eye of Harvard, her employer in Cambridge, Mass. Even she admits, in retrospect, it's no surprise they raised alarms.
In one, she wrote: "I am 2 snotty emails from professors away from bombing the entire Harvard campus."
Another said: "I was ready to get a shotgun and declare open season on all senior faculty members and students who dared cross me."
Burch said she thought only her friends were reading her blog, www.namenerds.com/ blog.
"I just didn't realize that anyone would be curious enough to actually read my journal," she said. "And, I mean, I know that sounds stupid, but there are thousands ... of these blogs online, and most of them are just really, really boring like mine. Who wants to read about the bike rides somebody took yesterday?
"As far I knew, it was just a couple of my friends who occasionally checked it."
She also never considered that anyone would take her blog seriously and believe her rants were an actual plan for a Columbine-like attack, she said.
"I say stuff like that all the time," she said. "Yeah, that's why they did fire me. I guess you have to be careful. Apparently, I'm some pioneer of what not to do."
Upsetting the manager
Whitney, 28, of Seattle, might fit into that category as well, though not on the same scale. Wells Fargo executives complained that his blog hurt the feelings of some employees at the company, suspending him with pay for two days, then firing him upon his return to work.
Though executives didn't tell him which blog entries were objectionable, he has his suspicions.
"I complained [on the blog] about having to sign a birthday card for my manager because she's not somebody I consider a friend," said Whitney, 28, who worked as an administrative assistant at the company.
Whitney also wrote on his blog, www.gravityspike.blog spot.com, that his boss was an "ice princess" - someone whose interpersonal skills lack warmth.
Now working at a nonprofit institution in Seattle, he's more cautious online. "I still blog, but I just leave work out of it," he said.
Little 'free speech' at work
The companies involved in the blogging incidents declined to comment on personnel matters or didn't respond to calls or e-mails.
Many bloggers said they had a sense that the First Amendment protects them from getting fired for exercising free speech. But the First Amendment prevents only the government - not private entities - from stifling free speech.
And employees apparently have little protection.
Roth, the labor lawyer, said employees do have protection from getting fired for discussing conduct that's discriminatory, reporting financial wrongdoing or whistle-blowing about violations of certain laws.
But labor laws were written to protect employees who raise their objections to government agencies or through complaint procedures at the company, she said. Courts wouldn't likely extend that protection to bloggers who air their complaints online without first reporting their concerns to regulatory agencies or the company, Roth said.
Company policy advisable
Rubel, vice president of client services at CooperKatz, a public relations company in Manhattan, said more companies should develop policies on blogging - just as many have done on the use of e-mail - because bloggers can become the "voice of the company."
Companies should also be wary of e-mailing sensitive information to employees, because it could hit the blogosphere within minutes, Rubel said. Instead, companies should send out printed memos, he said. It's one extra step that could prevent distribution, even though bloggers could scan or type the memos into their computers.
Although most companies have no written policy, others have very general policies.
Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft, which says it has 1,600 bloggers, "advises its employees to be smart when blogging," a spokeswoman said.
But Mischa Dunton, spokeswoman for software-maker Plaxo Inc., said: "'Smart' for one person may not mean 'smart' for another person."
Experience is a dear teacher
So Plaxo developed a written policy earlier this year. Plaxo employee Mark Jen, a former Microsoft employee who lost his job at Google because of blogging, developed the policy.
"At Microsoft, they're very open about blogging," Jen said. "At Google, it's a little bit different. Not many people that work at Google actually talk with the outside community [via blogs]."
Jen said that at Google he wrote about company information that was publicly available, such as financial performance.
After just two weeks on the job, he was called into the office of his boss' boss and was fired.
Google spokesman Steve Langdon wouldn't elaborate on the incident but said the company has guidelines for blogging and supports the many employees who blog about the company.
Now at Plaxo, Jen continues writing his blog, blog.plax oed.com, under the policy he himself penned.
"If you want to blog, it's probably a good idea to talk to people around your company and find out what the culture is," he said. "It's good to figure out the ground rules before you get started."
AVOIDING BLOG BLUNDERS
There's no such thing as safe blogging about work. But there is "safer" blogging. Here are tips from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which promotes civil rights online.
Don't blog using the company computers or the corporate network, even with your own laptop.
Use a pseudonym. Leave out any details that could possibly identify the company, including its location and industry.
Use services that allow you to post anonymously, such as invisi blog.com or eff.org.
Block search engines such as Google from including your site in the search results. Web Tool Central can simplify the process.
Use pingomatic.com to send out your blog entry to blog search engines. You can then delete the entry on your blog.
Protect access to your blog with a password or limit access to friends using services such as LiveJournal.
If you use your own domain name, don't provide your real name when registering the site.
- RICHARD J. DALTON JR.
Copyright (c) 2005, Newsday, Inc.
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This article originally appeared at:
https://www.newsday.com/business/ny-bzcov284399738aug28,0,6200459.story [/font]
