Dooced, Twerminated, Facebook Fired: Lingo and Facts about Social Media and Employee Terminations

From the jargon file: We continue to get a lot of media pickup on interesting findings from the 2009 Outbound Email and Data Loss Prevention in Today's Enterprise report. The latest is this post in the PC Magazine at Work blog that picks up on the widely-read story at Mashablethat notes the Proofpoint stats and a now classic example of how to get yourself fired for a Facebook post (and the termination itself happens via wall post):

Report: 8 Percent of Companies Fired Someone Over Facebook

That blog post also notes the colorful term for for being fired over a blog posting ("dooced") and its origins, so I thought it'd be useful to compile related terms along with the relevant 2009 statistics here (and yes, a significant number of terminations happen for violations of corporate blogging, social networking and related acceptable use policies):

• Dooced:To be terminated because of comments about the company by an employee on a personal blog or other message forum. PC Magazine's encyclopedia of tech terms notes that blogger "Heather Armstrong coined the phrase in 2002 after losing her job because of blog entries about work. Coworkers called her "Dooce" because she made so many misspellings typing "doode" as a joke to emphasize the "oo" in dude." 9% of large US companies Proofpoint surveyed said that they had terminated an employee for violating blog or message board policies in the past 12 months. About 72% of companies report that they have formal acceptable use policies for blog and message board postings.
• Facebook Fired:To be terminated because of a posting to a social network such as Facebook (alternatively, to be fired via post to such a network -- worse than the email pink slip, to be sure). The Mashable article referenced previously includes the canonical example of both senses of the term. 8% of large US companies surveyed by Proofpoint said they had terminated an employee for violating social networking policies in the past 12 months. Just over two-thirds of companies reported that they have formal acceptable use policies for social networking sites. If that number were higher, my sense if that we'd see even more frequent terminations in this area.
• Twerminated:To be terminated over a post to a short message service such as Twitter. This term hasn't become popular enough to warrant its own encyclopedia entry, but it seems to be catching on. While Proofpoint didn't collect discipline and termination statistics specifically about violations of short messaging policies, we did find that 13% of companies investigated the exposure of confidential, sensitive or private information via an SMS text or Twitter-type message. About 42% are highly concerned about Twitter as a source of data loss risk.

Comments

[David]

What does Donald Trump's picture got to do with the article? Isn't that sort of like spam in comments which is frowned upon?

[Keith R. Crosley]

This post is about people being fired for social media-related infractions.

In the US, Donald Trump is famous for (among many other things) being the host of a reality competition show called "The Apprentice" where, each week, one contestant is sent packing.

As is traditional, there is a catchphrase associated with such departures. Trump's is that he makes that grumpy Trump face, points to the contestant and utters, "You're fired!"

[David]

Thanks Keith for the explanation. I actually watch The Apprentice but didn't completely draw the connection. Must be my brain gap re TV vs Internet!

[Ruby @ Science Camp]

Thank you for these definitions. I just heard of an employee who got fired from a comment he posted on Facebook. Never thought that it could happen on Twitter and forums as well. I would suggest being responsible for whatever you are going to post. Make sure that anything you post on this social media networks is safe to say to anybody who knows you. Otherwise, go anonymous.