A woman who took offence to a conversation by two delegates at a programmer’s conference has been fired for inappropriately tweeting about the incident.
Despite the fact Adria Richards, a communications champion for a cloud-based corporate email provider, really should have known better, everyone responsible for implementation of search engine optimisation strategy should learn from the episode.
Indeed, the incident serves as an indicator for companies to review how their staff use social media channels.
Richards, a “development evangelist” at SendGrid, overheard two delegates joking in what she perceived to be an ‘adult’ way. Taking offence, she tweeted a picture of the person along with the offensive comments. This resulted in the man being fired by his employer. Afterwards, he tweeted an apology to Richards, along with an explanation that one of the comments that she found distasteful was a non-sexual term used by him and his friends to describe a business practice.
Following her actions, Richards has received a significant amount of correspondence, both supportive and negative, and was fired.
SendGrid’s chief executive Jim Franklin said in a blog post:
“A SendGrid developer evangelist’s responsibility is to build and strengthen our developer community across the globe.
“In light of the events over the last 48 hours… she can no longer be effective in her role at SendGrid.
“Her decision to tweet the comments and photographs of the people who made the comments crossed the line.”
Given her role, Richards should have known that her actions had the potential to turn negative. However, understanding that negativity is soon forthcoming online is something that those creating SEO strategies need to take account of.
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