It’s your duty as an employee to shut up for your company. I didn’t learn this until later in my career. Fortunately it didn’t have lasting impact.
By commenting on an ongoing PR crisis without consulting management, you are both undermining their ability to respond in an effective way — imagine how strange it would look to see a “Hey, X from <company> here” after an existing one was already posted — and you’re acting on your own rather than in a team. You’re a part of a team; how could you think it’s a good idea to act alone?
Of course, I am talking to my former self with this comment, since that’s exactly what I did at S2 when working on HoN. It was a mistake, and I gave the community the wrong impression about the company’s priorities.
You have to understand, when you’re given money to do a job, you’re not given authority to become that job. Just because your job is getting beat up on social media doesn’t mean you should just jump in and go “Hey, that’s not true!” It doesn’t matter whether it’s true. Here, let me pretend to be DDG:
“Hi, Shawn from DDG here. You’re right; this was an oversight on our part. Obviously we dropped the ball on this. To clarify, we were unintentionally gathering the data as a side effect of our favicon service. <some technical details here>. We’ll be acting immediately to reverse this, and we’ll be enacting policy changes to ensure that user privacy — our core mission — is maintained going forward.”
But that’s not what they said. And if you’re gonna tell the community the opposite of what they want to hear, you’d better be in charge of the company’s Telling The Community Things division.
Thank you for explaining this all far more eloquently than I ever could. DDG is precious and worth preserving, it wouldn't take much for the press to have a field day with a couple of careless comments. And no, I don't have a stake in DDG other than as a user.
By commenting on an ongoing PR crisis without consulting management, you are both undermining their ability to respond in an effective way — imagine how strange it would look to see a “Hey, X from <company> here” after an existing one was already posted — and you’re acting on your own rather than in a team. You’re a part of a team; how could you think it’s a good idea to act alone?
Of course, I am talking to my former self with this comment, since that’s exactly what I did at S2 when working on HoN. It was a mistake, and I gave the community the wrong impression about the company’s priorities.
You have to understand, when you’re given money to do a job, you’re not given authority to become that job. Just because your job is getting beat up on social media doesn’t mean you should just jump in and go “Hey, that’s not true!” It doesn’t matter whether it’s true. Here, let me pretend to be DDG:
“Hi, Shawn from DDG here. You’re right; this was an oversight on our part. Obviously we dropped the ball on this. To clarify, we were unintentionally gathering the data as a side effect of our favicon service. <some technical details here>. We’ll be acting immediately to reverse this, and we’ll be enacting policy changes to ensure that user privacy — our core mission — is maintained going forward.”
But that’s not what they said. And if you’re gonna tell the community the opposite of what they want to hear, you’d better be in charge of the company’s Telling The Community Things division.