Caveat Social Media

Pity Mr Rory Cullinan, a senior Executive at RBS and one of the unfortunate people who, according to the media, is expected to decide where the axe falls in the planned job cuts at that beleaguered organisation.

Mr Cullinan has been vilified in the press last weekend.  His crime was to send a few anodyne selfies privately to his daughter over Snapchat claiming that he was in “boring” meetings. Cullinan’s daughter appears to have decided (presumably on a teenage whim that I suspect she has come to regret) to share his pictures over Instagram – effectively making a private interaction between the two of them public – and a firestorm has resulted.

Even the politicians have dived in with John Mann, Labour MP for Bassetlaw in Nottingham, quoted in the Sun saying: “He should be stripped of all bonuses from his time as head of investment banking. Every single penny.”  Clearly something of an over-reaction, and this whole sorry affair was triggered by what was, presumably, supposed to be an innocent and light-hearted comment from a father to his daughter about the mundane nature of middle aged working life.

Quite apart from whether admitting to being bored in meetings is a crime, (if it is, I suspect it is fairly widespread in most companies) this episode does ring a major alarm bell for those of us who like to use social media in a personal capacity. What Mr Cullinan’s experience shows is that it is not possible to maintain a water-tight barrier between our personal interactions over social media and our working lives. Anything we say on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, or even the dating websites may be taken out of context and used to beat us if it suits the media’s agenda to do so.

As Mr Cullinan’s experience demonstrates, something said in jest (and, let’s face it, most things on social media are said in jest) can be taken out of context with dramatic and potentially devastating effect. Remember, Mr Cullinan didn’t say anything bad about his employer or its operations, or his colleagues. And remember that before this weekend, hardly any of us had heard of him.  And yet his selfies have launched him onto the front pages of the newspapers. This tells me that it is probably safest not to comment about working life at all on social networks.  A tough directive for those who spend long hours on the work treadmill, but safest all the same.