Social Cache.
A Nemo blog. Dealing with uncommon cents.

In the current economic climate it goes without saying that most small businesses have been feeling their share of the pain. Of course, depending on which particular sector of an industry your company has the most experience in also determines the number of times the dice will roll in your favor; some industries thrive throughout downturns others suffer as their clients suffer – hard and fast decisions have to be made almost weekly to keep a company on course. Nemo is thriving but we had to make a course correction.

Unfortunately, this week, Nemo had to make a very hard decision to lay off 9 of our employees; 9 very smart, gifted and intelligent workers, who through no fault of their own find themselves suddenly without a job. People are the backbone of every company so it goes without saying that their loss is also Nemo’s loss.

In the end we are all human and of course like every company should we care about our laid off employees welfare. To help them we decided to turn first to the power of the community and social media by using our Twitter account. By noon on the day of the lay offs I sent out a message [or tweet] to the community explaining the cuts, but more importantly letting companies know that if they needed these skilled workers they could get in touch directly with me or Nemo. It worked.

I was blown away at how fast the response to my tweet was. Obviously in such a tight-knit community there was an outpouring of goodwill and good lucks etc but, most importantly, more than five companies and/or individual business owners reached out to us for info about our released staff. The result was that some of the Nemo alumni were in job interviews as soon as the next day. Obviously good news all around and it’s worth pointing out the power of Twitter and reaching out to your supportive community online.

Our message on Twitter.

And a typical response and re-Tweet.

When the Nemo alumni land new jobs, and if they are willing to have me share the details, I will post them up here.

Follow us on Twitter: @NemoHQ

Tags: NemoHQ, social media, Twitter

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 8th, 2009 at 10:14 am and is filed under Agency, Interactive, Nemo Design, Social Networking, Twitter. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.