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If you’re thinking hateful thoughts about your colleagues or clients, don’t post them on your Facebook news feed – no matter how secure you think your privacy settings are.

Gloria Gadsden, an associate professor of sociology at Pennsylvania’s East Stroudsburg University, has been put on indefinite paid leave for what she thought was a funny Facebook update about hiring a hit man. ”Does anyone know where I can find a very discrete hitman? Yes, it’s been that kind of day,” Gadsden, 42, wrote in January. Another status update in February: “Had a good day today. DIDN’T want to kill even one student. Now Friday was a different story.”  She removed the second comment, but was nonetheless suspended after a student tipped off university higher-ups. (East Stroudsburg doesn’t have a policy of monitoring faculty social media, but a university spokesman said: “Given the climate of security concerns in academia, the university has an obligation to take all threats seriously and act accordingly.”) Gadsden, who’s worked at the university for five years, says school superiors cited the Amy Bishop case – where a biology lecturer allegedly opened fire at the University of Alabama after being told she would not be granted tenure – in suspending her. ”They found two posts, linked them together and are suggesting I was a threat,” says Gadsden, a recent convert to Facebook (she has just 32 friends), told Pennsylvania’s WNEP TV. “I told them I was venting. They’re family friends and it’s a private page.” Gadsden specifically chose not to friend students, but thinks an update to Facebook’s software altered her privacy settings and allowed friends of friends to read her musings.   Type “Facebook” and “fired” into any search engine and you’ll get an ever-growing list of people who’ve stuck a foot into the wide-open mouth that is Facebook – and it’s cost them dearly. A 2009 study by Proofpoint, an Internet security firm, found that 17 percent of companies report having issues with employees’ use of social media, and 8 percent have actually dismissed someone for their behavior on those sites. In the previous year’s study, just 4 percent were fired for their social media sins.  

All a good reason to check and re-check your Facebook privacy settings – or better yet, to confine any nasty work-related thoughts to offscreen conversations (preferably not within earshot of their subjects.) After all, Gadsden thought she had an iron curtain between her professional life and her Facebook life. “I actually did see that page as something that was not a part of ESU, not a part of my professional life,” she told USA Today. “I don’t invite students into that part of my life.”  

What was she thinking posting about wanting to kill a student? She was joking – she had a smiley face after the comment – and followup comments from friends suggest they understood the comment as humorous. (One said she was ROFL, or rolling on the floor laughing.) Gadsden said: “I had had a really bad day on Friday and then Monday went well and I was excited that it went really well. It was not intended to threaten a particular person, not directed to any student. Sometimes teaching is hard and exhausting work. Sometimes we don’t get support for that so we vent with family and friends and that’s all it was.” (For some other Facebook faux pas, click here.) The university is conducting an investigation, and Gadsden says she plans to file a grievance contesting her administrative leave.  In the meantime, Gadsden has been receiving letters of support “from around the nation, from faculty, from others who also had been target because of Facebook comments,” she said. “I don’t think there’s a definitive policy I violated so it would be nice if administration was clear about these things.”

What do you think? Were Gadsden’s bosses justified in putting her on leave? Or are employees’ Facebook comments purely private?

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I am intently watching the Olympics this year and it occurred to me, these brave and strong young people represent a business, the business of the Olympics and their country. Many even go through training on how to behave while representing their country. While watching the media hype around the games, one thing stood out: if there were going to be any remarks or behavior that weren’t humble, it usually came from a man, not a woman.

Now granted, the Olympics are hyper-competitive, more so than most businesses. So in such a competitive atmosphere, perhaps men are more self-focused than women. Here are just a few examples I’ve seen of unprofessional behavior among male athletes in Olympics past and present:

When asked to explain the team’s success, U.S. ski champion Bode Miller said, “aside from the fact that we’re just much better than anybody else…” He went on to say, “All the big events, I’ve always done well in—when I decide that’s what I want to do.” I guess he decidedly didn’t want to do well in Torino when he talked about skiing drunk in a 60 Minutes television interview. He touted that he had “an awesome two weeks while at the Olympics. I got to party and socialize at an Olympic level.”

Silver medalist figure skater Evgeni Plushenko questioned the judging, saying he was the only leading competitor to land a quadruple jump, and therefore should have secured first place over gold medalist Evan Lysacek.

In the 2008 Beijing Olympics, Ara Abrahamian of Sweden threw away his bronze medal in the Greco-Roman wrestling tournament because he thought he was robbed by the judges. He took the medal from around his neck during the medal ceremony, stepped off the podium and dropped it in the middle of the mat before storming off.

Korean speed skater Lee Jung-Su criticized Apolo Ohno as “too aggressive.” “Ohno didn’t deserve to stand on the same medal platform as me.” He said that he was so mad it was hard for him to contain himself during the ceremony.

On the other hand, a few positive things I noticed from the female athletes:

Gold medal skier Lindsey Vonn, who was the center of media attention with an injured shin, is very close friends with German skier Maria Riesch, who she competes with on a regular basis. She also reportedly considers U.S. skier Julia Mancuso as a competitive rival, but neither of them seem to say anything bad about the other.

The three women on the U.S. snowboard team, Hannah Teter, Gretchen Bleiler, and Kelly Clark, all medalists at one time or another, all pull for each other and call each other great friends. They also congratulated the non-U.S. gold medal winner very warmly. They all seem to be in it for the sport.

So, how does this relate to any business? Are women more humble than men? Sure seems like it in the Olympics. It also could just be that there are more male athletes in the Olympics so it’s a game of numbers. But these “business” men and women also have to be aware of what they might get out of it at the end of all of this: a great sponsorship. We all witnessed what happened to many of Tiger’s sponsorship deals when he seemed disingenuous.

Maybe in your business you need someone who is completely self-focused and self-motivated, and that’s ok. You just need to ask yourself–are you comfortable with the people that represent you and your company’s values? When you look at men and women in your organization are there clear differences in how they represent your company? If so, are the differences what you’d want them to be? Maybe so, but it might be worth a look.

Now before I get blasted by readers, women are not immune to bad behavior in these Olympic games, as noted by the shameful incident when our own figure skaters Tonya Harding had Nancy Kerrigan attacked. And on a positive note, gold medalist snow boarder Shaun White is a gracious, charitable man who is out to give his sport a great name. So it’s not a sweeping generalization, just food for thought and an opportunity to relate these exciting Winter games to your own business like I do at my company VerticalResponse.

Hey, I think Bode Miller is a great skier and really fun to watch. I just wonder, how many of you want him on your team, no matter how great he is? It’s just something to think about for your business.

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The promise of cloud computing has been around for years.

Like any new technology, it’s taken time for the vendor community to work out the kinks and get cloud computing ready for prime time.

While cloud computing comes in numerous flavors, what I’m going to address and what’s typically most relevant to small or mid-sized businesses is software-as-a-service (SaaS). This means that applications are hosted by service providers instead of running on your hardware in the office.

This is a big deal.

My company — a global PR firm with offices across the United States, Asia, and Europe — depends on extremely high service levels from the IT function. As a one-woman band managing our technology operation, I’m always striving to simplify IT deployment, but it can’t be done at the expense of functionality.

This is what led me to evaluate cloud computing for our office applications. After doing my homework, three options were left on the table: Microsoft, Google, and Amazon.

We opted to go with <a href=”http://www.microsoft.com/online/business-productivity.mspx”>Microsoft’s business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) solution which was best-suited for our size, reach, and 24×7 response requirements. This said, you should take the time to evaluate all three options because each provider offers a little different functionality.

Microsoft BPOS is a fully deployed, cloud-based version of Exchange, SharePoint, Office Communications Online, and Office Live Meeting, which allows us to offload basic functions such as e-mail and Web-based collaboration tools.

Why was this important? 

For one, our e-mail servers were almost four-years-old — ancient in “hardware years.” The money saved by not purchasing three new servers was a “no brainer.”

Furthermore, this approach meant substantial time savings for our IT department — i.e., that would be me. Microsoft now handles all updates and maintenance, and we no longer have to pay for applications to screen our e-mail for spam or check e-mail for viruses. 

For context, consider that our users send and receive over 100,000 e-mails a month. Before moving to the cloud, it used to take on average 12 hours just to back-up our systems. Plus we used to spend $3,000 per year on Trend Micro’s spam filtering services.  

Rounding out the picture, we were shelling out a chunk of change for collaboration tools such as eRoom (at $300 per license) and Citrix conferencing software ($1,200/per year for just three licenses). 

Microsoft’s BPOS enabled us to eliminate these costs and ensure that we always have the most current versions of comparable software and a secure environment. The service also comes with 24×7 technical support including support for multiple languages.

This last point carried some weight in our evaluation process. With Microsoft BPOS, our overseas offices now have quicker response time to e-mail and receive support in their local languages.

I also can’t emphasize enough the value of engaging with a knowledgeable third-party IT consultant to assist with the transition to the cloud. Just the task of importing e-mails from the legacy system into the cloud application is not for the squeamish. You want to make sure you have someone at your side who has been through this exercise before.

In our case, we partnered with firm called Zag Technical Services. Zag is a Microsoft Gold Partner, and their consultants helped us wade through all of the costs and steps involved in a successful transition, including the migration of 45 gigabytes of e-mail (which is why I used the term “not for the squeamish.”)

As you would expect, our transition to the cloud did not come without its challenges. For example, even though our transition was completed six months ago, I’m still receiving feedback — prefer that word to “complaints” — about e-mail limitations. Employees who have been with the company for five, 10, 15 or more years used to have no limitations when it came to e-mail use. Now, all of a sudden they’re confined by such parameters as a 15MB limit to attachments and 2GB of storage space.

And it’s worth pointing out that moving to the cloud has also meant that I had to relinquish some control. Simple requests to modify backend applications now have to go through Microsoft.

Not a problem going through a service provider if the changes are made fairly instantaneously with a three-, six-, even a 12-hour turnaround. But we are currently looking at three days — a bit frustrating for an IT director who is used to doing everything herself in-house. 

Nevertheless, from my perspective as well as from our CFO’s, the benefits far outweigh any downside.

Our mantra for 2010 is “shaking up the status quo.”

Our move to the cloud has IT leading the charge.

Linda Wilson is the IT director of The Hoffman Agency, a global public relations firm with 120 employees.

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