Sea of shopping cartsA colleague emailed me that he was terminated from a social networking site on which he had been a paid member for more than three years.

There was no real explanation given for the termination other than “…[his] style of participation … [and] … contributions to the community are not moving it forward, and have begun to harm its reputation. “Consequently, we have terminated your membership…”

His profile consisted of hundreds of network connections, forum posts, compliments, and event postings.

I personally could find no reason why this occurred as I found him to be a reputable sales person whose postings were continuously professional. But it does not matter why he was bumped from the site nor does my opinion matter. The site does have the documented right to do whatever they want with posted information.

This blog is a reminder to keep copies of all the contacts you make on any of the social networking sites including the content because once someone is terminated, everything is removed from the site. I suggest keeping a spreadsheet with contact information and copies of your posts.

This brings up an interesting point about who owns the digital intellectual content on any one of the social sites. Of course the fine print (that very few really read) on numerous social networking sites states that once an account, paid or free is terminated every contact and post is removed. So the rules to ‘play’ are apparent but I wonder if this is just.

I see two sides to this argument. When an employee leaves a company most are allowed to take their personal items with them. Although many companies do not allow employees to take client contacts with them if they are terminated even though that employee might have nurtured those contacts. But typically the latter rule is in place to protect the company as usually both the employee and the company are in the same business; governed by a disclosure statement.

In the case of a social networking site, which is merely a platform to post digital material and not a direct business competitor to the user, I question why the information is inaccessible for use by the terminated user.

What do you think?

Janine Gregor

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Filed under: Being a VA • Social networking

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