Blog Assignment #6

MSMC Blog Assignment #6
Organizational Behavior MGT 505.0-D1 Chapter 11:Case 2:The Business of Blogs
Professor Cynthia L. Krom By May Lee
10/22/07

“The Business of Blogs”

#1 What aspects of the communication process are blogs most likely to influence and how?
Marshal McLuhan, was the man who coined the phrase "the medium is the message”, meaning that the form of a message (print, visual, musical, etc.) determines the ways in which that message will be perceived. McLuhan argued that modern electronic communications (including radio, television, films, and computers) would have far-reaching sociological, aesthetic, and philosophical consequences, to the point of actually altering the ways in which we experience the world (www.leaderu.com). With blogs, this is absolutely true. With blogging, you can already suppose a few things. The channel is preset and the receiver is also pre-selected to those who are comfortable with the technology, interested in the message, and believe it to be more reliable than formal communiqués issued by top management (Robbins& Judge, 2007). There is no need for filtering down to your select target group since one has to actively look for the blog in order to read it. When non-routine messages are communicated through a channel low in richness, such as a blog, the potential for misunderstanding is huge.

#2 Although the grapevine typically is thought of as occurring within a given organization, blogging is a form of gossip that can reach beyond an organization’s borders. How might blogging change the way that companies are affected by gossip? What can companies do to guard against this?
With blogging, the proverbial genie is out of the bottle. No longer will outspoken negativism be confined to the water cooler, but it now has a tool that speaks to literally millions. There is no guarding against this. That is unless corporations make their employees sign non-disclosure agreements. But even then you still can’t stop people from being what they are, negative, incendiary, and grandstanding. You have to be prepared to spend a lot of time taking your employees to court. What corporations can do, and what many celebrities with their official websites have done is create their own venue to voice their own opinion. Say a Google employee posted a very negative blog on Google’s stance towards homosexuality. Google can utilize its own official blog site to address that very issue.

#3 Although companies would prefer to reduce blogs that speak negatively about them, what about blogs that detail mistreatment of employees or illegal work practices by upper management? Should employees post these types of blogs even though they may be reprimanded or terminated as a result?
This is a no brainer. Off course one should do the right thing and exact change from within. But if still unsatisfied, blogs are the natural medium to voice discontent. It’s free, it’s uncensored, and it reaches millions. Is there a price to pay? Off course. Corporations can hire you, they can fire you, and they can do virtually everything in between to include making your life a living hell before they fire you. That is the gamble you must take in speaking up or remaining the silent majority. Silent Majority is a term first used by the President Richard Nixon in a 1969 speech. It refers to a hypothetical large number of people in a country or group who do not express their opinions publicly (www.watergate.info)

#4 Is it ethical for companies to actively monitor blogs to gain marketing information? In other words, is the monitoring of blogs an invasion of privacy, or are bloggers inviting corporations to gather information because of the public nature of the posting?
Here the question is about ethics. What constitutes good conduct and what constitutes bad conduct? Is it good conduct for a company to monitor every blog to gain marketing information? Absolutely. Last I checked we have a free enterprise system. Is it bad conduct to punish the blogger who slanders and malign the company’s name with falsified information and incorrect data? Absolutely not. The nature of the public posting removes all intention of privacy for the blogger. It’s as if the blogger was shouting fire in the middle of a crowded theatre. The blogger is subjecting himself to a public questioning of the validity of his claims. If the fire proves to be a real threat, then he is absolved of creating a disturbance, and might even be awarded a good citizenship award if lives were saved. But God help him if there is no fire. He is punishable to the full extent of the law for causing a riot. We have to remember, information on blogs can be factual, propaganda, or completely falsified. Remember the old adage, caveat emptor.


References
1 Robbins, S.P., & Judge, T.A. (2007). Organizational Behavior ,Upper Saddle River, NJ : Prentice Hall
2 http://www.watergate.info/nixon/silent-majority-speech-1969.shtml
3 www.leaderu.com/orgs/probe/docs/mcluhan.html