The Blogging Backfire

by Charles Miller on May 14, 2005

Featuring employee blogs on your company's website is a very cluetrain thing to do. It exposes the unedited, individual voices that make up your organisation, free from the sanitised, corporate veneer. Generally it makes your company look alive, progressive and interesting.

So what happens when you're a magazine publisher whose founder and CEO has apparently just said "What does ethics have anything to do with professional reporting and journalism?" in a published interview, and the senior editorial staff of one of your magazines has resigned in protest?

Well, the front page of your flagship website looks something like this:

If this sounds like a bit of a cheap shot, it might be because my opinion of this particular publisher was already soured by previous experiences.

Update: An hour later, of course, the offending posts have been excised from the front page. But it was funny while it lasted.

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