Mintelligence - Minty Fresh Market Intelligence

We spend a lot of time looking at tweets. A LOT of time. Most of the tweets we look at relate to one business or another. We see a lot of scary stuff - both for the business owners and the tweeting employee.

This is the first in a series of twitter dos and don’ts, aimed mainly at the employee. Tip #1 - Assume your boss is reading your tweets. All the example tweets below are 100% real - with some tiny changes to protect the guilty innocent.

Tweeting about the interview

“Waiting to meet with a manager for interview at a hotel. This property is a baby in comparison to my old employer!”

Always assume that the interviewer has a twitter account and knows about the search function. Especially if you have your @username on your Resume. You really don’t want to have to answer this question. “So what do you mean by ‘this property is a baby’?” Even a relatively innocuous comment could backfire on you.

Tweeting about the new job

“Been a while since i tweeted, at a new job, not all that bad, but sucks anyway.”

So this tells me this tweeter has been at the new job just long enough to feel safe in wasting some time on twitter instead of ‘looking busy’.

Too much information

“So my new job title is Warehouse Manager. Still $1600 salary but more commission. Maybe I’ll stick around a little longer.”

If a coworker is reading your tweets they now know that you get more / less than she does. If your boss is reading this they now know that you’re thinking about leaving. If the other Warehouse Assistant is reading this and wanted the Manager title they might kill you. Probably not, but they might hate you a little!

Getting personal

“my manager just called and told me the new girl quit. Oh well, she was a liability and an idiot”

Three tweets before this we find out the new girls name, and the town she’s from. Six tweets earlier we find out where they work. As a customer of this establishment should I be wondering why a ‘liability’ was allowed to quit?

Remember - tweet + tweet = context

April “I got the job at ACME”
June “my new boss is called Hugh Joss - one letter out from a bart prank call”
December “i hate my boss”

So by looking through your tweets we figure out that you hate Hugh Joss, the general manager at ACME - where you work. I’m pretty sure we could find his email address pretty quickly.

You get the idea.

The simplest advice is to keep work and personal life separate. Potential employers can very quickly do a search for keywords like ‘manager’ ‘work’ ‘i hate my boss’ and find out if you are likely to say the same about them. Try this search for “hate boss” on twitter. Fun huh!

As more companies understand the power of getting their staff to tweet out a discount coupon they will worry more about the tweets either side of that coupon.

Let common sense prevail. If you turn up for work hungover - it’s probably not a good idea to tweet the fact.

Or if you have to - develop a code.

“totally in clover this morning!”

Posted in twitter

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