Watch your mouth on social media — or else

When a financial adviser in Chicago tweeted in February during President Donald J. Trump's speech before Congress about the widow of a fallen Navy SEAL, the ripple effects were felt far and wide.

When a financial adviser in Chicago tweeted in February during President Donald J. Trump’s speech before Congress about the widow of a fallen Navy SEAL, the ripple effects were felt far and wide. Soon after tweeting just 23 words, spanning 139 of 140 characters, Dan Grilo was fired, and his life was turned upside down.

I’m not going to repeat what he said here because frankly it’s not important. What is important is Grilo didn’t follow a cardinal rule of social media. And here it is:

When you work for a company, you represent that company 24 hours a day. You can’t leave the office at 5 and post anything you want and then resume the following morning at 9. Nor can you create a separate account for daytime you and nighttime you. This isn’t cold medicine; there’s just one you.

A lot of people have trouble with that rule, because it means you can’t share your opinions using social media. There are no exceptions; you’re either all in or all out. Grilo wasn’t popular on social media before this happened. The only reason people learned of him and his tweet is because he shared it while the speech was a trending topic. Grilo’s tweet ended up becoming its own trending topic.

And forget about deleting. It never works. Grilo tried, but it literally takes milliseconds for someone to screenshot a social media post and a few more milliseconds for that person to jump-start its journey toward going viral. Once Grilo hit the tweet button, all he could do was watch the inevitable happen.

As soon as I heard about this story, I knew exactly where Grilo had gone wrong. In my nearly 10 years of teaching social media to millions of people from high school and college students to media executives to grandparents to CEOs, I always start with this rule. The sooner you get used to being limited in what you say, the easier it is. If no one teaches it to you, it ends up more like a craving and people give into cravings.

I read some really bad advice in the days after this happened, including at least one person who suggested creating a separate, anonymous Twitter account and making sure to log into the right one before tweeting. That’s near the top of my list of the worst advice I’ve ever heard. There’s no such thing as anonymity on the internet. None. If someone wants to find out who started that anonymous account or where the tweets are being posted from, they can and will. I’ll say it again: You can’t create a separate account for daytime you and nighttime you, or weekday you and weekend you, or professional you and casual you. There’s just one professional you, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year (and yes, leap year counts.)

Think I’m overreacting? Let’s break it down by platform:

Twitter: This one is easy. A tweet is public. You can tweet to one person or to a group of people using Twitter’s Direct Message function, but most people don’t use Twitter that way. No one can know for sure, but it’s likely Grilo thought his few followers would see his tweet and that would be the end of it. He was wrong.

LinkedIn: When posting, you can select from these menu options: Public, Public + Twitter, or Connections. Let’s say you choose Connections. To this day, I haven’t met anyone who has done such a great job with their LinkedIn connections list that they know every single person. And even if you are the first, how well do you know those connections? Can you guarantee that one of those people wouldn’t take a screenshot and post it somewhere else? In other words, would you trust every connection with your career?

Facebook: Like LinkedIn, you can narrow down the people with whom you share, but once it’s out there it’s out there. And Facebook’s friends of friends setting makes it difficult at best to feel confident as to the exact people seeing your posts.

So why take the risk? Like your parents probably told you, if you have nothing nice to say don’t say it at all. This is one of those cases where it pays to listen to your parents. And if you refuse to do that, please listen to me.

If you have a social media question or an idea for a column topic, or if you have thoughts about this column or any previous ones, please let me know. Tweet them to me with the hashtag #socialmediaadviser or email me at [email protected].

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