Just about anyone who has worked in a large office has seen the company they work for make rash decisions about how firing an employee will affect their company. Although it doesn’t happen very often sometimes these decisions have a way of just blowing up in the companies faces and creating a PR disaster. Today I read about Ivell Marketing & Logistics who recently fired someone because of the contents of her Facebook account.
Ivell Marketing & Logistics recently fired Kimberley Swann, 16 from their firm for posting on her facebook about her job being boring. Now right away any of you that do Social Media Optimization, or Reputation Management would think this is something to be handled with tact with perhaps a written warning or some other kind of reprimand. As we all know that one whiff of a news headline relating around Social Networking, Social Media, or Facebook will be picked up by the blogosphere which can create a PR nightmare for companies (especially marketing firms). And lets all be honest most office admins find their jobs boring, especially if your a 16 year old female teenager.
The real problem with getting blogger all fired up is the fact that a lot of a larger bloggers have very strong sites which tend to rank fairly easy especially for company names like Ivell Marketing & Logistics which is a three word phrase. In fact if you Google the Ivell Marketing & Logistics company name you will find 5 instances of them firing Kimberley Swann in the top 10. The sad thing for Ivell Marketing & Logistics is this is still a relative fresh news story so as it gets picked up on a larger number of blog, where some of these blogs will credit their sources with a link they are in some real trouble.
With this kind of negative media and blog exposure its very unlikely that Ivell Marketing & Logistics would ever be able to push all these negative blog posts out of the top 10 on the search engines. With two or three negative pages in the top 10 it is possible to push them to the bottom of the first page or off completely, but once posts of this nature start to build organic links then it no longer becomes possible. Bad PR stories unfortunately can be some of the best link bait.