If 2006 is the year of the business blog, why do only 8 percent of the Fortune 500 blog? Janet says it’s primarily fear. She mentioned the McDonald’s blog as an example of one of these. As a former Enron employee, she says a blog would have helped bring that situation to light much earlier…so blogging is good from a corporate governance perspective. I agree that it is almost impossible to keep a secret today, as the sight of a dozen teenage girls taking pictures of the Carlsen twins yesterday showed (see the embedded YouTube video on this post.)
She also highlighted the example of the blog fakery from Edelman and Wal-Mart to illustrate the self-cleansing nature of the blogosphere, which Shel Holtz discusses here. She says Edelman will be hurt much more than Wal-Mart, particularly since they went silent on the issue for five days instead of acknowledging the issue and then coming back to address it.
It’s break time, but Janet’s presentation has been really helpful and interesting so far.
