HMV's Disgruntled Employee

Well here we are, reaching the end of my first dabble into blogging and exploring social media. From posting my first ever blog, to researching companies social media strategies, until finally taking a look at a companies social media fail!  While having a look around to find a company for this weeks blog it really was interesting to see just how many have actually failed and not just small companies either.  Taking a look over other students blog entries there have been some pretty monumental fails over recent times by big companies who either haven't hired properly trained social media personal or have had existing staff set up an ad hoc twitter accounts with the company failing to implement and track its use.  Which leads me to the topic of this final blog post which is HMV failing rather badly at controlling its twitter account.

HMV Overview 

Before I get into the social media fail in question, I'll briefly give you all a run down of who HMV are and if you would like to read their full story check it out here.  HMV are a retailer who sell and distribute music, moves, Tv series and some technology products and is based in the UK with around 120 stores, but also has outlets in Canada and Ireland.  Obviously however in this modern era of digital distribution, HMV has seen a decline in the retail side of its business and in 2013 went into administration only to emerge a few months later under new ownership.  Which brings us conveniently to the social media fail and this weeks topic.

HMV's Social Media Fail

The picture of HMV's twitter account the day of their failing is shown below with the original image being found in an article written by Gibbs, S (2013) found  here.  This such day ties in well with when the company went into administration and where obviously many employees were about to and did loose their jobs.  One such employee who ran HMV's twitter decided to blog all about his experience.

Now this obviously isn't very good publicity for HMV, as a rouge employee who is disgruntled at losing his or her position is venting their frustration in a very public and inappropriate way.  This is clearly unethical on behalf of the employee in question who is breaching what could be seen as confidential information but also possibly tarnishes HMV's reputation.  Almost comically however is the fact that there was a the clear lack of management of the twitter feed itself.  By having one individual responsible for the account with no clear management authority or guidance is a clear over site and one would think a mistake HMV would not make again.

Now it is unclear to me if in fact HMV did have any Social Media Policy in place at the time of this fairly nasty fail.  Dundas Lawyers state that a social media policy is:

"A Social Media Policy (SMP) is a document that suppliments a contract of employment to be legally enforceable by an organisation on its employees. The aim of an SMP is to clearly communicate what is acceptable conduct on Social Networking Sites by an organisations employees and contractors and what conduct is unacceptable and would make an employee liable to dismissal."

Now if HMV did have a policy which outlined appropriate social media behavior it was clearly either forgotten or deliberately disobeyed.  It is also hard to determine if the employee in question faced any legal consequences of their actions, but clearly as they were being fired anyway dismissal wasn't really a motivation for not going through with the tweeting rampage.

Consequences?

Unfortunately I can only make assumptions on the consequences and outcomes HMV faced after this social media fiasco. While there may have been some fallout of public relations and loss of revenue, the company was going into administration anyway thus the general public may have just viewed this just a failing of HMV internal security.  One outcome however is that no doubt they will be monitoring and managing their social media department more closely in future.  There is an old phrase which comes to mind however and that is "There is no such thing as bad publicity" and HMV definitely had their share of publicity from from this social media misuse.  While other companies that my fellow students have listed may not agree with that phrase (Malaysian Airlines and the "Bucket List"), I believe that HMV has escaped relatively unharmed by this social media outburst.

Summary

That about sums up my final blog post for Enterprise 2.0. To finish with I'll leave you with my usual tall person joke.  I've read and investigated a lot of interesting things over the course of these 7 articles and I hope this blog in at least some part has been interesting.

 

References

About HMV. About HMV , Accessed 23/9/2013 from http://www.hmv.com/about

Gibbs, S (2013), HMV's Twitter Account Goes Rouge. Accessed 23/09/2013 from  http://www.gizmodo.co.uk/2013/01/hmvs-twitter-account-goes-rogue/

Dundas Lawers (2011). Do Organisations need Social Media Policies?. Accessed 23/09/2013 from http://www.dundaslawyers.com.au/do-organisations-need-social-media-policies/#more-932.

Properties of Tall People shirts [img], Accessed 23/09/2013 from http://whyworldwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/funny-properties-shirt-triangle-tall-people.jpg

Dude [img], Accessed 23/09/2013 from http://memeguy.com/photos/images/friend-dropped-this-bomb-when-he-forgot-the-word-tall-22911.jpg