Yesterday afternoon Basab Pradhan, Senior Vice President for Global Sales & Marketing at Infosys,announced his departure from the company. Interestingly,the announcement was made by a tweet via Pradhan’s personal twitter account.
Leaving Infosys to go back to the startup world. To all my friends at Infosys – please stay in touch.
— Basab Pradhan (@basabp) July 9, 2013
For the record, Infosys was the first Indian company to officially introduce its social media policy. It appears, that now its time to revisit it!
Basab was also the member of Infosys Executive Council and this is the first time when any senior official from Infosys has used the microblogging site to make such an announcement.
No official statement is received from Infosys on the matter yet, probably it will club the news with the announcement of its first quarter results which are expected on July 12 (the way departure of T V Mohandas Pai was declared).Infosys confirmed the development in an email to NextBigWhat.
So what’s the problem now?
Use of social media to disseminate company information and private data came under scrutiny for the first time when Netflix CEO, Reed Hastings used Facebook to declare streamed hours of content in one month. Netflix was sent a notice for this but was spared without any fine.
In April 2013, the US Security and Exchange Commission (SEC) agreed that social media can be used to disclose company information as long as shareholders are told to expect. That’s in the US.
Back home, will Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) do something about it? Twitter & Facebook are still not mainstream enough in India. Is it fair that only a few who are on these sites are privy to a company development while others aren’t?
Merely 2 months ago, a report stated that SEBI has plans to issue social media norms for companies to prevent the breach of non public and confidential information. SEBI, was also planning to monitor mobile applications like BBM and WhatsApp and today Blackberry has agreed to address all of the government’s demands.
But still there are no clear guidelines from SEBI or Ministry of Information & Technology on the use of social media by companies for disclosing information to public. False rumors or fake tips spread through these digital mediums carries the gravity to plunge the stock rates,create havoc and violate the privacy of a client or shareholder.