Employees who take pride in their work are a priceless resource for any business. However, pride can sometimes manifest itself in negative ways when employees receive criticism and public criticism is a fact-of-life in social media. Imagine that your company has recently experienced a rash of product quality problems, and these problems have generated some unpleasant and occasionally unfair criticism on a variety of social media sites.

Someone even set up a Facebook page specifically to give customers a place to vent their frustrations. You and your public relations team jumped into action, responding to complaints with offers to provide replacement products and help customers who have been affected by the quality problems.

Everything seemed to be going as well as could be expected, until you were checking a few industry blogs one evening and discovered that a couple of engineers in your companys product design lab have been responding to complaints on their own. They identified themselves as company employees and defended their product design, blaming the companys production department and even criticising several customers for lacking the skills needed to use such a sophisticated product. Within a matter of minutes, you see their harsh comments being retweeted and reposted on multiple sites, only fueling the fire of negative feedback against your firm. You are horrified.

You manage to reach the engineers by private message and tell them to stop posting messages, but you realise you have a serious training issue on your hands.

Your task:

Write a post for the internal company blog that advises employees on how to respond appropriately when they are representing the company online. Use your imagination to make up any details you need. As a guide, you need to write approximately 100 words.