How To Avoid Social Media Mistakes That Will Get You Fired

How To Avoid Social Media Mistakes That Will Get You FiredHow To Avoid Social Media Mistakes That Will Get You FiredIts an interesting conundrum. As an employee or a job seeker, youre encouraged to be active on social media. After all, according to the 2015 Jobvite Recruiter Nation survey, 92 percent of recruiters said they are turning more and more to social media to recruit talent. But, your social media presence can also get your fired or keep you from ever getting the job in the first place.The trick, then, is to balance the opportunities social media provides while being mindful of the potential pitfalls.Here are four people who werent so mindful, and what you can learn from their mistakes1. Man asks drug dealer to deliver him weed at work on Twitter.Really? This happened? Yes.Quickly after a Canadian man tweeted asking for a drug dealer in the area to deliver him weed at work, the local versicherungsscheins Twitter account responded and, despite the tweeters claims that it wel ches a joke, the organization he worked at later confirmed he was relieved of his duties.The lesson Beyond the obvious dont post about illegal activities, you never know whos listening.Here, it was the police, but in everyday situations it could be your boss, your clients, or other people who may see questionable content you share and create problems for you at work. You may block people like your boss, manager, etc., but you cant ever really be aya who sees the things you share.Avoid posting things that are too controversial or could impact your status at work, even if its from a personal account, to make sure your social media activity doesnt hurt you down the road.2. Tennessee man posts death wish for local office on Facebook, resigns under pressure.Larry Hughes got a speeding ticket on the way to work one morning and instead of banging his hands on the steering wheel like most people, he took to Facebook. Hughes wrote a scathing post that wished death on the officer. Although he quickly took it down, the post had already gone viral.The result? Hughes received hate messages on Facebook from all over the country, and his employers got dozens of messages asking for him to be fired. Soon after, Hughes resigned to avoid causing the company any more problems.The lesson When something happens that makes you want to vent on social media, take a minute to think about the ramifications it could have on your personal and professional life before you hit the keyboard.If you cant stop yourself, type out your post in a text editor or email draft then read it over before posting it. More often than not, youll realize how harmful it can be and hit delete.3. Hydro One employee fired for live TV comments that went viral.Shawn Simoes thought he was being funny when he supported his friends vulgar interruption of a live newscast by arguing that it was f hilarious and not disrespectful, because it happens everywhere. Video of the reporter challenging Simoes and his friends, wh ich happened outside of a Toronto FC soccer match, went viral.Once newspapers made a connection between Simoes and Hydro One, his employer saw the video and quickly released a statement saying it was terminating Simoes based on a violation of its code of conduct.The lesson In our social media-connected world, you always represent your employer. Whether you post inflammatory things online or say them in public, theres a possibility that your employer will see them and take action.Yes, Simoes interrupted a live TV broadcast, so his face was everywhere within minutes. But the saatkorn thing can happen to you if someone around you is recording your actions. Just because youre not online doesnt mean you cant end up there, and if you do, your employer may not like how youre representing them.4. Facebook Twitter posts cost CFO his job.Gene Morphis was the CFO of fashion retailer Francescas Holdings Corp., until he started tweeting sensitive information about his company.Morphis had a very active social media presence and a blog that he used to talk about just about everything. The problems started when he posted things like Board meeting. Good numbers=Happy Board and Roadshow completed. Sold $275 million of secondary shares. Earned my pay this week on Facebook and Twitter.Company officials reviewed his social media accounts and found out that, on top of venting about the rigors of his job, he frequently shared information that violated the companys confidentiality policies. As a result, Morphis was terminated for cause.The lesson Whether youre the CFO, an entry-level employee, or something in between, sharing information about what youre working on or how you feel about your job could get you fired.If you cant avoid talking about work online, take the time to get to know your organizations social media policies so you know whats OK to talk about and what can get you in trouble.If you are going to talk about work online, its always good practice to keep things positi ve. Instead of venting your frustrations with your boss to your followers, talk about the good things youre doing or the role your company is playing in your community.Will employers like what they see when they look at your social media activity? Could what youre currently sharing get you in trouble?Lior Tal is the co-founder and CEO of RepnUp, a platform that helps you instantly analyze and clean up yoursocial media profiles and easily manage your personal online reputation. Connect with Lior and the RepnUp team on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Ode to the Disk Array

Ode to the Disk ArrayOde to the Disk ArrayWhen interviewing for a position at a high-tech firm, knowledge of these technologies will definitely be to your advantage. The persistent storage of the worlds information is a hot field. There are many uses for CD-ROMs, tape drives, solid state drives, USB flash drives, and other types of peripheral storage devices. You can study their features and functions, and you can learn about the customer situations in which they are likely be used.From my biased point of view, I view these storage devices as secondary when compared with the widespread deployment of hard disk drives. They can be found in the majority of desktop computers and laptop devices. They are packaged in rectangular canisters that contain platters that spin, arms that seek, and heads that read and write magnetic bits of information.You may get a job at a high-tech corporation that builds hard drives, such as Seagate or Western Digital. These companies are always searching for innovative ways to reduce costs, increase capacity, and reduce power consumption.Perhaps the most significant high-tech neuheit in the last two decades, however, is the introduction and evolution of the disk array, which is essentially a cabinet full of disk drives (the previous Wikipedia link depicts two disk arrays manufactured by my company, EMC). Every large, Fortune 500 company will buy their hard drive technology from a disk array vendor or vendors (as opposed to buying individual disk drives). Even small-to-medium size businesses prefer to purchase disk arrays.Familiarize yourself with disk array features and functions. They are a critical aspect of a corporate data center. In future posts I plan on elaborating more specifically about their many capabilities. In this post, however, I want to take a high-level look at their usefulness. Here are some of the more important features of a disk arrayThey are usually scalable. A small business can buy a disk array that contains as f ew as five hard drives, and they can add dozens more as their business grows.They centralize the management of user storage. Instead of storing customer data on personal hard drives, business will store the information on a central disk array. A system administrator can centrally allocate and dedicate storage to specific users.They centralize administrative tasks such as backups. Backup software can focus on backing up the entire disk array, as opposed to backing up individual hard drives.They can handle more besucherzahlen than individual hard drives. A disk array will often aggregate multiple hard drives together and make them appear as one, large disk drive. This virtual disk can actually handle simultaneous requests in parallel.They can be shared among many servers. An individual disk drive is typically dedicated to one server. A disk array can carve up disk capacity and dole it out to multiple servers.They protect data better than individual hard drives. Should a hard drive fai l inside of a disk array, the disk array will typically have a variety of recovery algorithms that allows the user to ride through a hard drive failure transparently.The disk array business is a multi-billion dollar enterprise. As the worlds footprint for information data continues to grow, the corporations that engineer and build disk arrays will continue to thrive and hire. If you interview with a disk array vendor (or if you interview at a company that purchases equipment from a disk array vendor), ask them about their disk array technology choices.In future posts, I will provide a set of questions that makes it clear that you have a working knowledge of disk array technology.Stevehttp//stevetodd.typepad.comTwitter SteveToddEMC Intrapreneur

Henry David Thoreau and why nothing is as it seems

Henry David Thoreau and why elendhing is as it seemsHenry David Thoreau and why nothing is as it seemsIn 1845, Henry David Thoreau made a famous pilgrimage to Walden Pond in Massachusetts to live in a tiny cabin that he built in the woods. He went to the woods, as he wrote, to live deliberately to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. He would live on his own means- no electricity and no running water- and like a Spartan, he would suck out all the marrow of life and reduce it to its lowest terms.He recorded his experiences in a book calledWalden, which is assigned in high schools and quoted inHollywood moviesto illustrate the virtues of self-reliance and humankinds connection with nature.I have a confession I hateWalden. Ive been envious of Thoreau- and not in a good way- ever since I read about his pilgrimage to nature. The story reminds me of my own inadequacies.You see, Im a city boy, raised in the urban sprawl of Istanbul- home to 15 million people. I have the soft hands of a typist. I dont own power tools. My work injuries consist of paper cuts (theycanbe nasty). If you put me in a cabin in Walden Pond- cut off electricity, running water, and wi-fi access- I wouldnt survive. So I envy people like Thoreau who can deliberately expose themselves to rough conditions and survive- nay, thrive.A few weeks ago, when I was reading Amanda Palmers excellent bookThe Art of Asking, I discovered a few more details about Thoreaus wild experiment with self reliance.It turns out that the cabin Thoreau built was less than two miles from his house- not in some remote woodland, as the story might imply. Almost every day, he took trips back to civilization, which was walking distance in nearby Concord, Massachusetts. He ate dinner at his buddy Ralph Waldo Emersons houseall the time. My favorite part Every weekend, Thoreaus mother and sister brought him a basket of f reshly baked goods, includingdonuts.The historian Richard Zacks sums it up well Let it be known that Nature Boy went home on weekends to raid the family cookie jar.I dont tell this story to poke fun at Thoreau (okay, maybe a little bit). I tell it because it highlights a far more important lesson The people we put on a pedestal often cant live up to their own legend.Long before social media, people were creating positive curated portrayals of their lives. If Thoreau lived in the age of Instagram, he may have been shooting selfies in front of his self-made cabin, while neglecting to snap photos of himself devouring baked goods freshly delivered to his doorstep.Much of what you see on the Internet isfake. You can purchase 5,000 Instagram followers for$40or get 5,000 YouTube views for$15. There are click farms, which are businesses where hundreds of computers and smartphones play the same content over and over to drive up fake engagement (heresa videoof one at work). People are even po sting fake sponsored content on social media, pretending to be brand ambassadors even though theyre not getting paid. Why? In the influencer world, its street cred,saidBrian Phanthao, himself a self-proclaimed influencer. The more sponsors you have, the more credibility you have.Gloss reflects more than it reveals. Nothing is as it seems.The next time youre tempted to put someone on a pedestal because of the story they tell to the world, just picture Henry David Thoreau- not sucking on the marrow of life- but feasting on his mom-made donuts.Ozan Varol is a rocket scientist turned law professor and bestselling author.Click hereto download a free copy of his e-book, The Contrarian Handbook 8 Principles for Innovating Your Thinking. Along with your free e-book, youll get the Weekly Contrarian - a newsletter that challenges conventional wisdom and changes the way we look at the world (plus access to exclusive content for subscribers only).Thisarticlefirst appeared onOzanVarol.com.