Employers (and employees) can learn some valuable lessons from CNN’s firing last week of a reporter over an allegedly inappropriate Twitter tweet.

The Story

CNN fired Mideast correspondent Octavia Nasr — a 20-year employee — after she tweeted her admiration for the recently deceased Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah. Fadlallah, considered a founding father of the Hezbollah movement, was aggressively anti-American and was allegedly linked to bombings that killed several hundred Americans.

In her tweet, Nasr called Fadlallah “one of Hezbollah’s giants I respect a lot.” After negative reactions poured into CNN, the company issued a statement calling Nasr’s tweet an error in judgment.

Nasr apologized, saying in a blog that her tweet was intended to refer to Fadlallah’s record on women’s rights. During his tenure, Fadlallah banned “honor killing” of women and authorized women the right to strike their husbands if attacked. Nasr admitted that using Twitter’s 140-character-max format to comment on the life of such a controversial a figure probably wasn’t the best idea, calling it “something I deeply regret.”

Despite Nasr’s apology, CNN decided that her credibility had been irreversibly compromised. It issued an announcement stating that after it discussed the incident with Nasr “we have decided that she will be leaving the company.”

What This Means for Employers

Employers should be keenly aware of the humongous negative publicity that can be generated by Twitter tweets and other social media activity by employees. Employees should be trained on the potential career-limiting effects of such posts. Time and time again employees get themselves (and their employers) in trouble because they seem to believe that less traditional forms of electronic communication are (1) subject to different workplace rules and/or (2) somehow less permanent. As many employers and employees have painfully discovered in recent months, neither is true.

Here’s  a link to our sample social media policy.