News that a Yahoo employee is charting the hourly progress of his redundancy from the Internet giant using Twitter made the BBC yesterday (http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/technology/2008/02/twittering_a_yahoo_exit.html).
The job of PR just got a whole lot harder. We’ve long known that disgruntled employees and customers have a huge impact on how the company is perceived externally after a shake up. But the emergence of blogs, ‘tweets’ and status updates on social networks shifts the power balance significantly. ‘Control’ of any external message is impossible without the co-operation of everyone involved. Including those being laid off.
This might be a good thing for those of us who care about the reputation of PR. There’s never been the magic wand of PR that so many companies want, and ‘spin’ – a concept I find patronising to both the journalists and consumers who are supposedly taken in by it - is dying out. Now corporate employees have the same (or better) access to and influence on the media agenda as their corporate PR teams, really good PR will have to start at home.
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