We’ve read of many articles talking about to go about setting up social media policies in your company, how to involve your employees in enforcing them like in IBM and the importance of having some sort of guidelines at the very least. I too, agree with such importance but what happens when one breaks the policy; or in a worse case scenario, defamed your brand / business on the vast world of social media networks?

Now, I’m talking about a step beyond negative comments. It’s more of a direct allegation or news that may affect your brand image.

Perhaps you could warn or fire that particular employee. But what if the person who accused / defamed your business isn’t part of your company? What will you do? Or rather, what can you do?

There was this incident that happened very recently where I’m at about this guy, pretty well known for his presence on social media (he blogs and comments on social issues) and he Tweeted a (later found untrue) statement about an employee from one of Malaysia’s top publishing companies. The tweet said something about the employee being disrespected and mistreated by her employees AND employers.

To cut the long story short, the guy then had to apologize 100 times on Twitter over three days, admitting that he has indeed defamed the publishing company and he finally completed his ‘sentence’ at about 7pm today (Saturday).

I say this as an interesting incident only because of the unique ‘punishment’ of posting 100 tweets – definitely the first I’ve seen which led me to think:

• Is it necessary?
• Is it effective to begin with?
• What would be the best way to punish / address someone in a situation such as this?

What do YOU think?