Some Houstonians are criticizing the ‘El Tiempo Cantina’ for a social media post from last week that showed a photo of co-owner Roland Laurenzo posing next to U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions and the business has shut down its social media accounts. For a local expert on Facebook, Twitter and other social media, that’s a good idea.
Eric Tung is a Houston-based social media consultant who told Houston Matters Monday that “it can be a good idea to step back if what you are saying is not being accepted by your community, by your, by your fans, your followers.”
Sessions visited Houston last week and delivered remarks about illegal immigration and how it can sometimes be linked to crime.
Since the Attorney General was the Trump administration official who developed the zero tolerance policy to be implemented at the border, with the subsequent separation of undocumented migrant families, some of the people who criticized El Tiempo’s post were uncomfortable with a Hispanic local business saying it had been an “honor” to serve Sessions, as the original post noted.
Some people even called for boycotting the restaurant.
For Tung, the business is in its right to publicize having a high profile government official as a customer, but if somebody is supposed to manage El Tiempo’s posts on social media, he or she should have realized Sessions’ presence could be a “hot button topic.”
“Make sure you know what you’re trying to say on social media before you say it,” Tung underlined, while adding that nowadays there are publishing software programs that allow the user, especially if it’s a company, a business or an institution, to require approval for posts to go out.