What happens when the company Twitter user quits?

Hopefully what is typical is not to be defined by this article recently in the Guardian:

A Twitter user is being sued for £217,000 by his former employer for taking his online followers with him when he switched jobs.

Noah Kravitz, a writer from Oakland, California, amassed 17,000 followers on the social networking site when he worked for PhoneDog, a website providing news and reviews about mobile phones.

He posted Twitter messages under the name @Phonedog_Noah, but in October 2010 he left the company, renamed his account @noahkravitz and took his following with him.

PhoneDog has launched legal proceedings seeking damages of $2.50 a month per follower for eight months, for a total of $340,000.

The company is arguing that Kravitz's list of followers constitutes a customer database and the valuation is an estimate of how much each follower is worth to the company.

The case raises questions about the value of Twitter to companies that are increasingly using the website to communicate with customers and promote their products.

Legal observers believe that if damages are awarded against Kravitz, it could set a precedent for assigning a commercial value to Twitter followers acquired in a business context.

For more details see Company sues ex-employee for his Twitter followers (by Robert Booth).

Twittering in the workplace

According to a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, a Korean company is experimenting with Twitter as a means to communicate with and between its 7,000 strong workforce.

Some brief details:

...At LG CNS, a group of developers who maintain the company's array of internal message boards, employee blogs and databases decided the Twitter-style service could provide a means for mass communication that was less formal than email and less technical than postings on topic-oriented bulletin boards.

The group of employees took several of the key Twitter APIs and built BizTweet on LG CNS's internal network. Last month, they invited 1,000 employees to test BizTweet.

What has emerged, they say, is a real-time public conversation in the company.

On Monday, the company made BizTweet available to all of its employees, and they posted more than 300 messages...

For more detail see Korean Firm Tweaks Twitter for Workers by Evan Ramstad.

Organisational twittering

According to a recent article in the CIPD's People Management magazine, employer organisations are increasingly getting into the idea that recent Web 2.0 developments, such as Twitter, can bring benefits for organisations.

However, as usual, not without an examination of the potential and pitfalls of such mediums of communication.

A quick summary of the benefits:

- keep HR users up to date with practice points and legal developments
- reduces traffic on company email systems
- avoid long-distance calls

A quick summary of the 'challenges':

- inappropriate comments
- criticism
- monitoring use
- headaches with privacy and data protection laws
- compliance with confidentiality, electronic security and anti-harassment procedures
- interference with 'employee engagement'
- scope for bullying and harassment

Of further note in the article is the discussion of case law to emerge from employee 'misuse' of such methods of communication in relation to employment - details:

Cases involving social networking sites so far include Hays Specialist Recruitment (Holdings) Ltd v Ions (2008 EWCH 745 HC), where a former employee copied confidential business contacts to his LinkedIn account, and PennWell Publishing (UK) Ltd v Ornstein (2007 EWHC 1570 QB), which examined who had the right to contacts made during the course of employment.

For more details see Why only twits would ignore the potential (and pitfalls) of Twitter by Julie Gorham (this article may not be available to non-subscriber two weeks after publication).