When you leave a job, you're traditionally entitled to the contents of your cubicle or other workspace, your retirement plan and -- if you're willing to pay a lot more for it -- a few months of continued health insurance. But what about the Twitter followers you racked up on your employer's behalf?
A lawsuit in the Bay Area raises that question and proposes to put a value on a Twitter follower. Wireless-news site PhoneDog Media is suing journalist Noah Kravitz for $340,000--that's $2.50 per Twitter follower times 17,000 followers times eight months -- for renaming the company-branded @Phonedog_Noah account he had set up to the more personal @NoahKravitz after his departure from the firm and then continuing to use it for his own purposes.
The case has been simmering along for several months (following an earlier suit by Kravitz against PhoneDog charging breach of contract), but vaulted into mass-media headlines after the New York Times covered it on Monday.
NEWS: Twitter Redesigns Sites, Apps
On one level, this could be simple to settle: If there's a signed contract that says who owns the account and what happens to it after an employee leaves, that's the end of the story. It may not be the fairest arrangement, but that doesn't matter if consenting adults ink it.
But since Kravitz and PhoneDog don't even agree if he was an employee or a contractor -- a core dispute in his prior lawsuit -- I have a hunch that no such legally binding document governs his Twitter use.
Kravitz didn't answer a request for comment via Twitter. PhoneDog president Tom Miller e-mailed a statement saying that the company "permitted and directed Noah to establish the account using the PhoneDog_Noah naming convention" -- not the first-name-last-name moniker he switched the account to after leaving the company.
I can't help thinking "disposable Twitter account" when I see a company-plus-person handle like that, not that I will dispute PhoneDog's right to make that marketing mistake. As for the particular legal dispute here, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California will begin hearing it Jan. 26.
NEWS: Twitter Confirms Late-Day Slump
But what about the larger issue? It's a safe bet that tweeting on the job will become less of an occupational hazard and more of a job requirement in many professions that require connecting with customers. You have two ways to deal with that eventuality: Either you let your employer escort you onto Twitter (or some other social-media outlet) or you preempt that situation by getting there first with a username that doesn't link you to any one company.
The first course of action would work if you don't care to have a lasting presence on Twitter (fair enough), trust that every future employer will have your best interests in mind (good luck with that) or don't plan to switch jobs ever again (seriously, good luck with that). The second risks sinking time and effort into what could yet become this decade's MySpace and doesn't rule out a pig-headed firm unjustly trying to annex your account after the fact, but it boosts your chance of developing an online identity independent of the name on your paycheck.
(As longtime readers may recall, I have some experience with this sort of thing.)
And that should be worth something, if not quite as much as locking in affordable health insurance independent of a job.
Now about that $2.50-per-follower monthly value cited in PhoneDog's suit: Is it too late for me to ask Twitter for a raise?
Credit: Rob Pegoraro/Discovery
No comments:
Post a Comment