Not long ago, PBR had one of the viral moments that you actually do not want to have. You can read about that here. As a result, the guy responsible for hitting send on that tweet was let go from his job.

There’s a lot of lessons you would expect to glean from that experience. Things like:

• Why it’s important to have a strong approval process

• The importance of brand voice and tone

• How you can secure brand social accounts more effectively

• Etc

But there’s a better takeaway here that was captured decently well in this AdWeek interview. They sat down with Corey Smale, the (now former) PBR brand manager about the experience, his termination and investigating how it actually happened.

Your Job Affects More People Than Just You

While I thought he had some good nuggets on the community aspect of brand building, it was Smale’s self awareness of the downstream effects of that tweet that impressed me.

Corey Smale made one really poor error in judgement sending that tweet. We’ve all made dumb decisions on various scales.

What I think Smale has done well, in addition to holding himself accountable and not passing blame, is to look at how his actions affected more than his job. He knew that how he portrayed the brand had a ripple effect on the whole organization. That level of self-awareness is honestly refreshing in the marketing space.

My former boss Mark DeMoss used to always tell clients “if you are collecting a paycheck from an organization, you are part of their PR team.” Meaning, it didn’t matter what your role was. Whether you were a CEO, marketing director or an accountant, you represented that brand in everything you did.

Marketing is one of those functions that can easily live in it’s own little bubble. It’s a vertical that likes to pat itself on the back more than other functional areas a lot of times. We praise those who take risks and play by the rules.

What I think is important to remember that those risks we decide to take, those rules we think are worth breaking, affect more than just our own personal career paths and livelihoods. Sure, I may do something crazy with a brand social account and get my own feature in AdWeek, And that would generate a ton of likes on LinkedIn.

But how would that affect the other people who aren’t involved? How would me doing something that jeopardizes a brand’s equity affect the paycheck of someone else’s household bottom line?

Take risks. Do bold things in marketing. Some ideas are so crazy you have to try them. Innovation isn’t safe work.

We all should have to realize that the stakes of our behavior are often higher than we’d like to admit. Corey Smale is self-aware enough to realize it. We’d be good to realize it too.