As you’ll have heard, a picture paints a 1000 words, and nothing confirms that more than when you use the wrong image on social media!

When I saw this article in Adweek, Vince Vaughn and Co-stars Pose for Idiotic Stock Photos You Can Have for Free, I laughed, a lot. Too often I see these kind of stock photos on company websites and am immediately turned off!

The Repercussions of Using the Wrong Social Media Image

Images set an example and people will no longer accept anything less than authentic. If you are using them on your site, please ditch them and use the ‘real’ people you employ. After all, what will future recruits or clients find behind your closed doors, airbrushed models with perfectly straight white teeth?

So having chuckled at Vince Vaughan and the cast of Unfinished Business, hopeful that the ditch-the-stock trend may catch on, I was appalled to see this job post on LinkedIn.

Talk about using the wrong social media image!

Recruitment agent, Stephanie O’Connor, made a bad assumption here. She assumed that people would know this was from a movie and find it funny.

Yet, even here, when she’s received 416 comments – the majority expressing their distaste – she keeps the post live and in fact, mocks with “Desired result #AIDA”.

From that, you can read that Stephanie desired to have the post go viral, which makes me wonder:

1. Didn’t she notice that the people complaining were not secretaries but potential clients… clients who now won’t work with her or ICS?
2. Is LinkedIn actually the right place to have an advert for a secretary go viral?
3. How is receiving such a viral barrage of negative comments helping her agency?
4. Did she not understand how many laws she was breaking?

I doubt she expected, the intense abuse she received or to look completely unprofessional. What staggers me is how disrespectful she was to the women – and men – who were objecting.

And why leave up a social media image, that’s causing offence, until BuzzFeed gets wind of it? Now, even though it’s finally been deleted, it’ll never be gone from her or ICS for good.

Besides the poor judgement involved in using this image, there’s also the fact that she didn’t actually have permission to use this image in this way.

Just because you can find an image online doesn’t mean it’s yours to use.

3 better alternatives:

• Use on of these 101 free stock photo sites – avoiding aforementioned points and giving credit where credit is due
• Try out Buffer‘s fabulous new photo tool Pablo
• Create your own with Instagram and use IFTTT to get it to Twitter as an image instead of a link.