There have been two recent articles in the news regarding employees use of social media in the work place. The first was posted on techcrunch.com and mashable.com and claims that 8% of the companies polled by ProofPoint, an internet security firm, have fired an employee due to their misuse of some of the most popular social networking sites, such as: Facebook, Twitter, My Space, Plurk, etc. (read the article here: mashable). The other was posted on the Society for Human Resources Management (SHrM) website, and was titled: Twitter with Care: Web 2.0 Usage Offers Few Second Chances. Similarly, the author notes that misuse of these popular sites can land employees in the proverbial hot water with their organizations (read the article here: SHrM).

Now some people may think that the appropriate course of action is to go home and erase every social media account they own. This might be a tad drastic. The lesson to be learned from these articles is to use social media, but make sure you do so in a responsible way. As organizations catch up with the rest of the world, regarding social media, they will surely become savvier at detecting your activities in the digital world. So the next time you decide to rip your boss a new one via your Facebook status, take a step back and think to yourself, “Is there any chance that he/she will see this?” There is a good shot that the answer is, YES!

For all the HR managers out there, it might be a good idea to make a clear statement in the company’s employee handbook that outlines the organization’s policies and attitude toward social media. Including social media as an aspect of the company’s policies and procedures should make employees think twice about posting inappropriate material.