Fire Charlie. Fire the Tweeter? No, Fire the Manager!

On Saturday, October 3, 2015, the official Twitter account of the Texas Rangers MLB franchise posted a message "Fire Charlie.# bye". The tweet was sent during the blowout loss of the University of Texas Longhorns' football team to the Texas Christian University Horned Frogs. Therefore the Charlie mentioned in the tweet appears to be the Longhorns' football head coach Charlie Strong. According to this ESPN report, the Texas Rangers organization then deleted the Tweet and announced discipline in reaction:

The tweet was posted by a member of the team's social media department who was neither working for the Rangers nor was at Globe Life Park today. Effective immediately, that individual is no longer employed by the Rangers.

Let's break this down and see how effective this immediate action really was.



The phrase member of the team's social media department certainly implies that there is more than one person working with social media at the Texas Rangers. We can guess that this is most likely a junior member of the staff, if only because that is the case with most marketing departments.

The statement then goes on qualify that the individual was neither working for the Rangers nor was at Globe Life Park today. I interpret this as meaning the Texas Rangers want only people at the ballpark, during work hours, to be posting to social media.

So then why is the choice of action to fire the (likely junior) member of the social media team?

Here is what probably happened: someone had their personal account and the official Texas Rangers account resident in the same app. And that person voiced their displeasure with the blowout Longhorns' loss through the wrong account.

No employee should ever be in a position to damage the brand through such a simple mistake.

That is the fault of management. It is the fault of marketing management and information technology management for not having proper procedures and policies in place.
 Here are your three simple rules for protecting your official Twitter account from this kind of inadvertent misuse as a personal communication channel:

1. Direct access to the Twitter account is not allowed. The password for the Twitter account is held only by marketing management and IT.
2. Mobile access to the official Twitter is limited to one app selected for use by the business, such as HootSuite.
3. To avoid any confusion, social media team members are prohibited from using the same app for other accounts.

If the Texas Rangers are actually serious that only those on duty should have access to the account, then replace rules 2 and 3 with one, even simpler, rule - no access to the account through any app on any personal device.

Again, these are policies and procedures that marketing and IT should have developed and enforced. it should not be up to a junior person to remember to use the right account.

• DO use an application like HootSuite to shield direct access to Twitter, while allowing for collaboration 
• DO NOT share the Twitter password so that a junior level employee has direct access to the account
• DO keep personal accounts and work accounts separate to avoid just this kind of accident
• DO NOT develop a policy of official use only and then allow access on personal devices

If the Rangers were serious about who had access to the Twitter account, someone off duty could not confuse their favorite personal Twitter app with the app that controls the official account.

And if the Rangers were serious about enforcing that policy, they would fire someone higher up than the employee who sent that tweet.