Again, a short, and hopefully obvious post on why you should be very careful on what you blog about, and especially what you post on social media. Humans disagree on everything, sometimes fervently, and we have all seen or heard about cases where this gets beyond a few Chinese whispers behind someone’s back.
But as a business owner or employee, in the age of the internet and social media you need to be extremely careful of this, as a company is generally an easy target for anonymous posts and reviews, which in the age where everyone relies on reviews to select a product or service, could backfire seriously.
This is just as applicable to a small business like mine, as it is to a massive company, and as a friend told me once, you only get one-shot with your reputation. You can build the most amazing open source software, write Doom!, fund hospitals, donate to the poor, and help the starving in Africa.. but you only have to fuck one goat, and you will only ever be known as as “that goat fucker!”
With me it is a fine line I need to tread, firstly I don’t do any advertising anywhere, I have always got my gigs based on my reputation and word of mouth, and I get my reputation from what I build, author, or publish on this site. Sometimes a post or feed gets picked up and my site traffic goes up from it’s usual dozen hits a day (excluding all the bots) to ten or twenty thousand. I’ve reset the counters on this site a few times so I have no real clue where I am, but I’m generally on one of the first few pages of a google search, though usually for silly small projects such as my blinkenlights, or low rate encryption, never one of my bigger more serious projects.
I also have my bio and a link to this web site in the few technical sites I regularly visit Hackaday, EEVBlog and Hacker News, which of course helps improve the traffic to my site if somebody sees a post I make, but also means I have to be especially careful what I say, less somebody decides to be vindictive.
I bring all this up not because of the Elon Musk/Tesla elephant in the room currently playing out in the USA, but because I have noticed a few other bio’s in these, and other social media sites lead not just to valid companies where these people are employed, or even own, but also seem to lead to companies they do not work at! This is relevant because if your bio says you work for company X, and you post very opinionated comments, some people might decide to take it out on company X’s reputation.
Again I don’t want to go all investigative on this due to all the reasons in my previous paragraphs, but it is easy to see by just going back on a users comment history. It has also made me realise how vulnerable many companies are in this day and age to some sort of attack based on this, especially those like me who live or die by their reputation.
