Slashdot Mirror
Corporate Blogs, From Bellyache To Headache
An anonymous reader writes "The Washington Post is running an article about corporate blogging and the headaches that come with it. From the article: 'Like anonymous blogs supposedly written by employees of Microsoft Corp. and Wal-Mart Stores Inc., the BearingPoint blog is, in many ways, just like happy-hour conversations that employees are apt to hold after work. They gripe about inane training programs, grouse about absurd corporate policies and ruminate about management incompetence. But transferred to cyberspace, where the audience is global, the management headaches associated with such grumblings become instantly more severe.'"
Those usenet postings are just a search away on Google groups. Sometimes I pull a few up just to shiver at what an idiot I was. Heh, maybe in 15 years I'll be Googling my old slashdot posts. Posting on the internet is like getting a tatoo only a tatoo is easier to erase.
Is anyone really surprised with that? In a time where a company's stock price can fall by 50% and the execs get 50 million bonus while the employee's pensions are being cancelled, how can you say anything good about management?
Peter.
haven't RTFA, tbut if a company looks like it would blog(server/internet news companies) Then they problem don't want you to know to much about them. That means there probably evil. There you have it, no blog = evil.
Maybe companies should be less inane, absurd and incompetent. If a company is inane, absurd and incompetent (and most companies are inane, absurd and incompetent) it is the fault of inane, absurd and incompetent management.
But they'll just fire everyone instead.
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
BearingIT is the blog in question. The guy really comes off like a whiny douche. He's complaining about the company even before he is hired!
--Chag
Most people won't gripe about little stuff to anyone with authority to fix the problem and so most organizations have this crazy idea that there aren't that many little problems to be dealt with.Another possibility: Communication. If the worker bees don't understand why the fsck they're going through some "inane training program", you can bet that they're going to bitch about it.
Things that may seem 'reasonable' to upper management may come across as incompetence if the workers don't understand WHY
I RTFA and while some of the things being complained about aren't fixable overnight, if people know when and how the issues are going to be resolved... you might not get public venting of corporate messes.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
I see this as being a little like open source software. Just as open source exposes bugs to the world, ensuring a better quality product (because not many people will touch it if they can see it's crap), so too do these blogs expose all the corporate horseshit that has piled up in so many companies.
If companies have a problem with this, maybe they should just plain clean up their acts so they don't have to worry about it so much. And no, just having an "ethics statement" on the walls and in the orientation folder isn't enough.
I look forward to a time in the near future when companies are damn near meticulous about this, because they're constantly terrified of the bad press an anonymous blog might bring. They should be constantly terrified. How many other forces are strong enough to keep them in line?
Sure, there's always going to be someone who'll find something to bitch about, but if the company legitimately takes care of its people, it won't matter. It's not like reading someone's complaint that Acme Corporation never has Boston Creme donuts in the kitchen will keep me from applying to Acme Corporation. Or hiring them for contract work.
The company still has a right to fire the blogger, of course. But they do not have the right to subpoena the records of a blogging host or ISP in the course of their investigation. I'd sure like to believe that "lots of money is at stake therefore we get to trump law enforcement" doesn't fly with judges.
The Internet is full. Go away.
So what do you expect regarding blogs?
The blog that TFA refers to is here.
...cluetrain manifesto.
Blogs like this are the effect; the cause of which is the corporate stupidity and closed wall, rigid heirarchy that they ridicule in their book.
Not that I completely agree with locke et al; but they make some very good points.
err!
jak.
Has anyone got a link to the Bearingpoint blogger?