Have you been wondering what the impact blogs and social media has had on businesses? Clive Thompson provides some great real-world examples and analysis in his March 2007, Wired magazine article, The See-Through CEO.

Pretend for a second that you’re a CEO. Would you reveal your deepest, darkest secrets online? Would you confess that you’re an indecisive weakling, that your colleagues are inept, that you’re not really sure if you can meet payroll? Sounds crazy, right? After all, Coke doesn’t tell Pepsi what’s in the formula. Nobody sane strips down naked in front of their peers. But that’s exactly what Glenn Kelman did. And he thinks it saved his business.

The article also discusses examples of companies that have tried to hide or not acknowledge corporate mistakes.

If you engage in corporate flimflam, people will find out. He (Don Tapscott) ticks off example after example of corporations that have recently been humiliated after being caught trying to conceal stupid blunders. There’s Sony, which put a rootkit - a piece of spyware - on music CDs as a secret copy-protection technique, only to wind up in court when bloggers revealed that the code left their computers vulnerable to hacker intrusions.

Look through the CPRS Code of Ethics, and it is very encouraging to see that we have been endorsing the transparency / honesty that the article discusses for some time now. Specifically,

• A member shall deal fairly and honestly with the communications media and the public.
• A member shall practice the highest standards of honesty, accuracy, integrity and truth, and shall not knowingly disseminate false or misleading information.

We as PR practitioners simply need to continue adhering to these standards in the new social media world, but we do need to become familiar with this new world. Find out what people are saying about your company, your products/services, your executives. From the positive or negative feedback you can gain an understanding of what is being discussed. If nothing is being said, you can learn from that as well.

As Mr. Thompson points out;

Since Internet commentary is inescapable, the only way to influence it is to be part of it.

• The See-Through CEO, Wired magazine - March 2007

Michael Lund is the Electronic Communications Chair for the CPRS-Hamilton and the Website Manager for the Halton Region.

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 31st, 2007 at 11:59 pm and is filed under News, Public Articles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.