Who Should Speak?

taking some heat for not commenting quickly enough on Microsoft's decision to it happened to me. Increasingly when big corporate news breaks the community doesn't want to just hear just from the CEO. They want to get the perspective of someone they trust even more, the corporate blogger. This puts pressure on these individuals to comment on every major news announcement that impacts the community - and to do it quickly. The problem is, the bigger the organization, the further away they might be from the epicenter of the news. All of this leads to a larger issue. Who is a corporate spokesperson? Is it any employee who blogs, the CEO, who? My theory is that every company that has bloggers has multiple "spokespeople." Some, like the CEO, address shareholders, key customers and more. Others, unit managers, bloggers, evangelists, address one or more communities. Where this gets messy is the media. Both Scoble and Del.icio.us") | Yahoo! My Web Senior Vice President with Micro Persuasion weblog, which tracks how blogs and participatory journalism are changing the public relations practice.