Beware the lowly blogger, all ye mighty multinational corporations, for the keyboard, the RSS feed, and the comments section are mightier than the public relations sword. The Economist In the story, The Economist recounts a few corporate disasters online, like the problem with Diebold acquiring Global Election Systems (GES) to add electronic voting to its portfolio. While Diebold did the customary "due diligence," it ignored blogs that complained about GES' lack of a paper audit trail. The dustup over that and other complaints about GES eventually found its way to the traditional media, where newspapers and TV news began to criticize Diebold so much that several state governments changed their decisions to use Diebold's voting machines. Many corporations have learned to keep track of the blogosphere, and services from companies like Factiva and Nielsen have been developed to help fulfill corporate needs to track commentary in blogs and forums. The vast majority of big corporations have not performed one task that could help them mitigate a crisis, and that is to do some blogging themselves. But the corporate mindset today tends to frown on public dissension by an employee. While many firms may admire Microsoft for letting Robert Scoble take the occasional shot at the company, few have thick enough skins at the executive level to handle criticism, let alone the transparency a good corporate blogger needs to be taken seriously by others. document.write("Email Murdok here.") Drag this to your Bookmarks. Add to document.write("Del.icio.us") | Yahoo My Web David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business.
Blogs House "Brand Assassins"
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