February 24, 2011; Source: USA Today | Sometimes technology just gets ahead of people’s good sense. So it was for the recently dismissed Jeff Cox, the deputy attorney general in Indiana who replied to a Mother Jones magazine tweet about the Wisconsin union demonstrators, suggesting that “live ammunition” be used on them and that demonstrators were “thugs” and “political enemies.”
Hardly behavior befitting an elected official, it took only a few days before Cox was fired.
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Lori Bentley, who writes a blog for IT Business Edge titled Governance and Risk, suggests in a post on the topic that the situation should suggest to us that we should all have policies related to the use of social networking tools by employees.
A spokesman for the AG’s office points to the employee handbook which contains a provision “requiring employees to act in a professional manner during and after work hours” but he also says, according to the USA Today article, that the office is developing policies related to the use of social media. Here is a link to a sample social media policy at IT Business Edge. But we'd love to hear your feelings on the matter. Do you have a social media policy? Do we all need one?—Ruth McCambridge
