One of my job responsibilities with Grizzly Athletics is to run our social media campaign. As mentioned before, we have the most successful social program in the FCS and rival many other bigger schools. Because we have built something so valuable and significant, I closely guard all of our social media outlets and act very protectively over them. When it comes to our SM accounts, I always have three major nightmares:

1. Our accounts get hacked
2. We randomly get kicked off one of the services we utilize.
3. A post/tweet that is not meant for one of our platforms ends up getting sent out.

My third fear became reality for another organization this past week in a rather ugly incident. Thanks to Aaron Traylor and 107.5 Zoo FM, I saw their report about what happened on the Facebook page of the Montana Office of Tourism. To make a long story short, the Montana Office of Tourism has a gold mine of a Facebook name in simply “Montana.” Because of their prominent and simple name (along with good marketing efforts), the page has close to 200,000 “likes”, a solid number for a Montana organization. Anyway, a person with administrator privileges on the page posted this doozy of a status:

“F this job, I just want to live in Whitefish with my family and my future husband. Leaving Bozeman for good tomorrow…Jim Langley I love you with all my heart and you are not leaving me. Never. Thanks for the good times MercuryCSC!”

MercuryCSC is the advertising agency for the Montana Office of Tourism. So, an employee for MercuryCSC accidentally sent a status update meant for her page to the Facebook page of one of her company’s clients. In just ten minutes the status had close to forty comments before it was taken down. The Montana Office of Tourism later issued a statement apologizing for the incident.

Of course I am not here to scrutinize this specific situation. Rather, I am here to try to learn from it and make sure it never happens on our outlets. I admittedly walk a fine line. Social media is a 24/7 business, especially in athletics. Because of this, I am constantly updating our accounts both in and out of the office. When I am doing it outside of the office, I am using my iPhone. I always have to do a lot of switching back and forth on my device to go from my own personal Facebook/Twitter/Instagram/Etc accounts to those of Grizzly Athletics. All it takes is a wrong tap, a little bit of laziness, or a moment of not-thinking to make such a costly error. The last thing I would ever want to do is inadvertently send something out regarding myself to all of Griz Nation.

Luckily for me, I would never personally send something out over social media that contained anything resembling a curse word. I know far too well to never come close to posting anything of that nature on my personal accounts, thus making it a non-issue of something that vile ever reaching our Griz accounts. If I were to ever inadvertently post to my work accounts, I would probably make the error of notifying Griz fans of this terribly written blog. Gee, come to think of it, that might be even worse than sending out an obscenity.

We all need to go through stringent measures to separate our work accounts from our personal accounts. As evidenced above, it is all too easy for disaster to occur. Don’t Blink.