I was sitting in a pub enjoying a few drinks with my fella on Saturday afternoon. We’re both a tad geeky, so we’re sat there with our iPads scrolling various things, catching up on what delights Twitter has to share, laughing out loud as we scroll through awkwardfamilyphotos.com … as you do… Then he waves under my nose a job description for an anesthetist  at the Royal Liverpool & Broadgreen University NHS Trust. A tiny bit tedious, I think, but I read through it wondering what I’m going to see and thinking perhaps I’m missing the point here, or that he thinks I need a career change and a ‘real job’. Then, there it is, the offending line, ‘Usual rubbish about equal opportunities employer etc…’. Oops. We have a little chat about how poor that is, then move on (more hilarious photos to look at of someone’s dreadful haircut and jumper taken in the early 80s – this is the important stuff that the web was invented for). Then yesterday I’m sitting at my desk and the same story pops up on my Twitter feed a few times, because the local newspaper have now written about it and it’s spreading around social media. This is the way things go.

Now, I’ve written a lot of copy in my career in communications. And many a time I have inserted something in as a space holder while I wait until I write what I actually need to write in there. I have also used beautifully and painstakingly crafted ‘filler’ phrases such as ‘blah blah blah’, ‘write this bit later’ or the even more offensive ‘Lorem ipsum’. The point is, we’ve probably all done it. Granted, not all of us have written something that could be deemed offensive (though I expect I’ve done that too), and most of us probably have replaced the offending text before it gets published. But you can see just how easy it is for it to happen. Quite frankly, I think it’s shocking that we even still need to say things about public sector organisations being ‘equal opportunities employers’ anyway – shouldn’t that be a given? However, the point I’m coming to is that these kind of mistakes will have been made hundreds of times all over the place. They’ll be spotted, reported and replaced. But now, social media means that the speed with which a mistake can be made and shared leaves us with no room for these kind of errors. A decade ago that mistake even if it made the local press would have been tomorrow’s chip paper. Now, it’s out there, forever. It’s searchable, and it’s archived online.

Social media sites are full of mistakes, and we’re pretty forgiving of many of them. The odd spelling error, occasional links that don’t work, poor grammar. It’s really not the end of the world and nobody’s organisation is going to die because auto-correct changed a few ‘s’s to ‘z’s (God bless America). But when the error is in the content, not the construction, then it is less forgivable. This riles me a little as we all make mistakes, but we never used to take everybody out and flog them for it. But now, we do. But I have to say, it did make reading a dull NHS job ad’ and the equal opportunities rubbish so much more interesting! Surely we can make this stuff, even the essential ‘policy’ stuff a little more interesting otherwise who would want to work for you? Just perhaps less offensive… But then employer branding is a whole other topic of conversation.