That said,
1. Business is cut throat. It's helpful for people in business to be cut throat, it helps them to survive and move up the org structure. They also get budgets and climb the ladder through increasing headcount below them.
2. This SVP didn't have you reporting to them, it sounds like you were putting their role at risk. It appears you didn't coordinate PR campaigns and didn't get approval for every statement (how else were your posts flagged, if you didn't post without prior approval). It could be a lack of policy which created these issues, but IMO I can see why the SVP responded the way they did. You can call it bullying if you'd like, but that's life and the way it works.
3. Even with point 1 and 2, something seems off. No one thought it was weird your posts were being flagged? No one backed you up? This new SVP just moved in and removed you with no comment? Why? People don't act hostile for no reason. Did the SVP just view you as a threat? Seems like something is missing.
Finally, I definitely would have personally handled it by just speaking with you or working through it. I've worked a lot with public relations teams and never would have thought they'd lash out at their public face (seems like a bad policy...).
I used the term "flagged" which was described in the article. I assumed it means that "this SVP was sharing them with your boss and saying -- this is bad" or something.
Who was this SVP? Why did he setup the social media council? What was his job function?
I am curious, do you still do social media just as much on the side, or is it your main job now? And do you look back at your days then and think you were tweeting too hard?
> In fact, I was so prolific on social media that I got the attention of several industry analysts who asked how my company used social media for brand promotion and marketing. Of course, since I was in engineering, I sent these inquiries over to our PR department.
The SVP was likely feeling the author was impacting company public relations, independent from the point team.
It would be equivalent to someone in marketing force pushing code to production.
Regarding the authors feelings -- again, he's stepping out of his role and not coordinating with the marketing team. Of course leadership would ask him to knock it off or be fired.
> His stern look communicated that he was talking about my career and was clearly not messing around. I felt bullied, threatened, and scared. Because I feared being unfairly scrutinized and I'd just had my job threatened, it was tough for me to feel comfortable saying anything about my work life on Twitter after that.
Shouldn't have been talking about work life on twitter anyway... The way the author discusses "bullying" is literally every interaction in a business. Organizations must be clear and consistent. Leaders need to be as well. Yes, they can fire you; yes, they can tell you what to do. That's life, that's the way human designed structures work.
> There are a few reasons why I think this happened to me. Being a young Black man in the tech field put me in a vulnerable position where different equals disposable. Maybe being privy to Rick's inherent lack of knowledge of the very thing he professed to be an expert on gave me some perceived leverage over him; thus, I was a threat to be eliminated. My lack of seniority and title also put me at a disadvantage. Ultimately, I believe that in true bully fashion, he got his kicks by using his power to affect other people's lives for sport.
Maybe that's true, but in all likelihood the author was stepping out of line. Discussing race in this context seems to detract from that actual events. The author even quit his "dream" job to to work in social media...
> This eventually led me to quit and pursue my passion for social media marketing outside my "dream" company.
Clearly, the author wasn't interested in their engineering job and decided to do something else -- fine, but not what the company hired them for.