Within the past 10 days I have told someone “Don’t put into an e-mail, chat, a tweet, a Facebook status update or anywhere else something you don’t want on the front page of the New York Times.” It’s classic communications advice.

And yet, Goldman-Sachs executives are apparently too stupid and too arrogant to show any such restraint. The U.S. government has launched a fraud lawsuit against Goldman-Sachs for, among other things, misrepresenting to the federal government the company’s losses during the mortgage crisis, and according to the New York Times, “creating a (financial) product secretly designed to fail for the benefit of a favored hedge-fund client.”

In email messages, “Lloyd C. Blankfein, the bank’s chief executive, acknowledged in November 2007 that the firm had lost money initially. But it later recovered by making negative bets, known as short positions, to profit as housing prices plummeted. ‘Of course we didn’t dodge the mortgage mess,’ he wrote. ‘We lost money, then made more than we lost because of shorts.’”

According to the times, Fabrice Tourre, a Goldman-Sachs trader and a defendant in the SEC’s suit, wrote in an e-mail to a friend:

“I’m still stuck at work at 10PM, but it’s been six years since I’ve been functioning on this @!$#@!$@$# schedule, so who cares. I feel like I’m losing my mind and I’m only 28!!”

It’s not as if Americans like the investment community right now, and this sure isn’t helping.

In so many stories of corporate malfeasance, reaction to the facts surrounding a company’s misbehavior (whether alleged or proven) is so often overshadowed by damning information that comes through other, informal communications channels, like remarks made at a company party, or in an e-mail.

In 2003, jurors watched a portion of a four-hour videotape of a company-paid $2 million party in Sardinia thrown by Dennis Kozlowski, then CEO of Tyco, for his wife’s 40th birthday, which included “Margaritaville” singer Jimmy Buffett and an anatomically correct statue of Michelangelo’s David spewing vodka. Kozlowski and his CFO were on trial for looting the company of $600 million. Who’s brilliant idea was it to videotape the party? Kozlowski apparently laughed about the video after leaving court for the day.

More recently, Phil Jones, head of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, set off a storm of media controversy over global warming when he sent a series of emails with some ill advised (though apparently somewhat true) remarks about the quality of certain research on the topic, giving detractors a golden opportunity to call into question the validity of all global warming research.

It’s hard to give everyone media training, but that’s the only way to avoid these situations. A company must be truthful. It must communicate on a timely basis any circumstances that must be brought to the attention of regulators or law enforcement. But there is no rule that says the company must allow every employee to publicly say anything he or she wishes. And that’s what being careless about informal communications amounts to.

I’m not suggesting cover-ups. The only thing worse than writing a dumbass email is deleting it to hide a smoking gun. In fact, deleting emails brought Arthur Andersen, a multi-billion dollar company, to its knees. Don’t do it! It’s probably illegal. (And deleted emails aren’t deleted any way. Another story for another time.) But save yourself from embarrassing the entire company and imagine every email, every tweet, and every café remark you make is public.

Again, I’m not saying informal communications are the problem. Unethical and illegal behavior are the problems. But companies are compounding the problems with ill advised informal communications that always seem to come out.

A little commonsense will allow you to retain some degree of control over a crisis, or avoid it entirely. As soon as there are emails containing a company executive’s claims that it made billions of dollars when it told the government exactly the opposite, and videos of the CEO’s anatomically correct sculptures with their, um, er, well you know as a spigot, you’ve lost in the court of public opinion.

Tags: Goldman Sachs, enron, email, Arthur Andersen, crisis communications, tyco, party, Sardinia, global warming