3 Comments »Thirteen Virgin Atlantic crew members have been fired after insulting passengers on the Facebook fan page for the airline. According to the BBC, the employees were calling passengers “chavs”. What is a chav exactly? I had no idea until I looked it up. According to Wikipedia:
Chav, or Charv/Charva, is a mainly derogatory slang term in the United Kingdom for a person whose lifestyle, branded casual clothing (especially if counterfeit), speech and/or mannerisms are perceived to be common, proletarian and vulgar. ‘Chav’ is often used as a stereotype to refer to white, poorly educated, aggressive youths, but youth and aggression are not the defining attributes of a ‘chav’. The term is similar to America’s ‘white trash’ stereotype.
Not only did they make derogatory comments about passengers but they “also reportedly claimed the planes were full of cockroaches and alleged the airline’s jet engines were replaced four times in one year.” Publicly discussing these things crossed the line and soon enough all thirteen employees found themselves jobless.
Lesson for company employees: acting unprofessionally via Facebook and having that content publicly accessible to your company will result in you losing your job. This is definitely not the first time and it isn’t the last time that this will happen. So for all of you that want to call people a “chav”, a “yo”, or whatever derogatory term you choose, Facebook is probably not the best place to be doing so. Honestly, you may want to ditch the habit all together!
Great story, and yes you will see more of this as well as a new sensitivity for negative comments in general. Everyone talks around the water cooler about things they might not like about a job, but when that conversation becomes searchable and part of another larger conversation you have crossed the line. Virgin is all about the details, and it will be interesting to see how companies use social media in a proactive way. Imagine if Virgin had a facebook group started by the employees about how much they love their customers.
This is a story about Virgin taking action against disgruntled employees, but the other part is that Virgin doesn’t have their act together with social media pr and blogger relations. If they knew what they were doing, this wouldn’t of happened in the first place. Those employees are probably telling the truth, the probably do have roaches and all that. Firing the ones talking about it doesn’t make those problems go away.
Ultimately this will start to be protocol of a new employee handbook, explaining how they should talk about the company online. And if they have enough money they can hire John Bell and Rohit at Ogilvy PR 360 digital influence to do it for them.
Most corporations already have a handbook or code of conduct about what is appropriate and not when posting in social networks or even when representing public face of the company in any medium. I bet if you looked through their employee contract there would be something there.
If Virgin didn’t have this I would be surprised. If they didn’t they will now and if it’s out of date it will be updated. Even without it, the employees should have known better.It shows an amazing lapse of “collective” judgement on their part. What they said could lose the company millions (along with jobs) and any company with a reputation to protect is going to act similarly. Being British I know exactly what “chav” means and it’s a pretty insulting term to use (even if they thought it was true).They were paying passengers, which, like them or not, are in part the employees bread and butter.
Virgin probably isn’t firing the employees for talking about it, but for talking about it in the medium they did and not via internal channels first (assuming they did this). And firing them is probably a message in itself.
Many companies are reluctant to use Social Media because they fear knocks to their reputation. While it is all very well to say you’ve got to let people speak their mind in every case, it often is not that simple and it’s a very fine line between freedom to say whatever you want as the employee of the company who pays your salary and is a SERVICE company in a struggling industry. Most companies would restrict that. Meanwhile, we’re saying to companies “hey Google yourself and monitor what’s being said.” There you go.
Now they’re unemployed I suppose we can expect to see more dirt from the ex-employees…not too helpful if they want to work in the industry again. They’d better hope they won’t be rubbing shoulders with too many of those chavs.
It’s difficult to know exactly what was said by whom in this case when most of us only get to read things second-hand (at best). But Virgin’s actions show that they, at least, were unhappy with what was said.
This is a good example of how social networks need us to adopt new social norms. To us, Facebook feels as though we are in an exclusive group of our friends but in reality we’re in perhaps the most public space possible. When we discuss things we’re not having a private conversation but a very public one.
I’ve written some more about this and about how we need to adopt new social manners in social networks like Facebook, if anybody is interested:
http://blog.freshnetworks.com/2008/11/why-you-should-be-careful-what-you-say-on-facebook/
Matt
FreshNetworks