Live Tweeting a Layoff: 'How do I shut down Twitter?'

Moral of this story:  Disable your social media account holders’ access before you fire them.

Unfortunately, in today’s economy, layoffs aren’t an uncommon corporate reality.  HMV, a UK based company that delivers entertainment products, announced 190 job cuts in total on Thursday, after struggling with financial difficulties and entering into administration with restructuring specialists. 

Layoff announcements of 60 HMV employees at some retail locations triggered a very public Twitter meltdown Thursday from one employee – community manager Poppy Rose – who decided to live-tweet the whole drama as it went down. The problem: that employee had access to and tweeted it from the company’s Twitter account, which has more than 73,000 followers.

One tweet read, “Just overheard our Marketing Director (he’s staying, folks) ask ‘How do I shut down Twitter?'”

 

Rose claimed during the brief tweet-opera that “senior members of staff at HMV “never seemed to grasp” how important
social media was in building links between themselves and customers.”

Now that the company’s followers and news outlets have all taken great notice of HMV, perhaps she at least had that point right.