Reputation - thy other name is Fragility

Not many people knew who Dave Carroll was until a few months ago. He was a Canada based singer ( a guitarist ) who used to give public performances in and around Canada and the US.

One day travelling from Halifax to Nebraska, looking out of his plane window he saw three Baggage Handlers throwing and mishandling his guitar. Before he knew it he was handed a broken guitar with an unrepentant Airline called United Airlines.

He was made to run from pillar to post with United trying to shrug off their responsibility to compensate for it.

So Dave did what came to him naturally....wrote a song about this episode and uploaded it on to YouTube. It is on the link to this blog - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YGc4zOqozo . His YouTube music was soon downloaded like the very plague and had over a million hits. Dave followed it up with two more songs on the same episode.

United went into a tizzy as soon as they knew that their reputation was in tatters. They issued a rejoinder ( also in the same vein ), agreed to compensate David and were red faced. They even learnt a lesson or two out of this episode and updated and modified their Customer Relationship Management lessons for their staff.

Dave used the power of the YouTube - a social media ( video based ) site to vent his frustration.

Imaging what this tool will turn out to be in the hands of an employee who is upset and angry either with his Manager or with his Organization. While a majority of Organizations today have all policies now in place prescribing what employees can and cannot do on social media sites and they do have the power of penalizing ( Otherwise known as sacking ) an employee who transgresses these rules, nothing still prevents a disgruntled employee to wreck havoc to a Company's reputation with the push of a keyboard button.

It will be a good positive move on the part of an Organization to, at the time of induction itself, let employees know of all the avenues open to them to approach the various people in the Organization with their grievances. No use embedding them as rules and policies in thick Employee handouts and books and ask them to read it....it has to be debated and discussed and put across to the employee as to what is acceptable and not acceptable behavior as far as damage to reputation is concerned.