This is a writing sample by “nycghostwriter,” AKA Barbara Finkelstein. It is “How to express yourself on social media,” a blog post originally published on the IBM Researcher platform. You can get professional ghostwriting services from a published blogger. Email me or fill out the short form on my contact page.
For starters, don’t follow Ricardo Rosselló’s example.
Rosselló is the soon-to-be ex-governor of Puerto Rico who hoisted himself on his own petard by:
Calling the former Speaker of the NYC Council Melissa Mark-Viverito a puta (Spanish for whore).
Threatening to shoot the mayor of San Juan.
Assailing the victims of Hurricane Maria as “cadavers for cows.”
Rosselló shared all of these dummy thoughts and more on Telegram, a text messaging platform his direct reports could access from any one of their devices.
If you need a reason for exercising discretion on social media, Ricardo Rosselló is it. Once his political enemies broadcast his deep thoughts, nothing else could rehabilitate Rosselló’s reputation. Not his B.A. from MIT. Not his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan. Not his Beijing-based start-up. Now Rosselló’s social media bloviations are sending people to his Wikipedia page where they learn that he once drove a car while under the influence and ended up killing a woman and her child.
And let somebody else take the fall for him.
In the wake of “Telegramgate,” thousands of people in San Juan took to the streets to demand Governor Rosselló’s resignation.
Plenty of other people have come back from public missteps. Richard Nixon did. Bill Clinton did. Maybe Rosselló will too, and the next time we hear from him, he will be announcing his run for Congress.
Good luck with that.
Social media texts, especially the embarrassing stuff, have a way of living forever. What are the chances that Rosselló’s opponents will ever let sleeping perros lie?
Early on in my IBM communications career, some high-level media relations guys sent around an email where they evaluated a female colleague’s anatomy. One of those geniuses accidentally hit “reply all” and shared the gang’s analysis with the woman in question. Nothing much happened to those guys. That was then. This is now. If the governor of Puerto Rico couldn’t survive a communications gaffe, could you?
We may all be using many different publishing platforms these days, but communications best practices are essentially the same as they were fifteen years ago.
Firing off irresponsible texts and emails in the workplace can come back to haunt you. And why shouldn’t it? In the workplace, you do not own the words that come out of your mouth. The company or state you work for does. If you have an uncontrollable urge to shout, declaim or act like a thirteen-year-old, save it for the bar, the ball field, your therapist’s office or your journal. Save it for your novel.
When communicating with your colleagues on Slack or Sametime — and every other platform — think twice before venting your hostility. As the lawyers say, don’t put anything in writing you wouldn’t want to see on the front page of The New York Times. For better or worse, not everything is fit to print.
You can read this post on Brook’s Blog, a project of IBM Research.
