04.16.07
Suing (Or Threatening) A Blogger? Dumb Move
James Robertson of Cincom Smalltalk has been following the story. Apparently, a woman wrote in her blog about a bad personal experience with an employment agency. The agency responded with a personal attack in the comments of her blog, followed by a letter from an attorney to remove the blog entry or face a suit.
Naturally, the woman posted the information about the letter, and the story has ballooned to something much bigger, with other bloggers now posting their personal experiences and discussion about the threat now being on television, YouTube, and other blogs.
I have little to add to the conversation, other than to repeat Mr. Robertson’s comments: this is just plain dumb. The company should fire whomever decided to threaten / sue, fire the person who leaked personal information in the response to the blog posting, and immediately do whatever they can to patch things up. Now, without further commentary, here are some links to information about the situation.
- Legal threats are a poor response to a PR issue.
- Legal threats are a negative PR event.
- Legal threats are a bottomless pit for PR.
- Gets worse for the company and its attorneys.
- Chart shows impact of threats on Internet searches.
- Still going downhill … into the trees.
- One can track the spread of the information throughout the blogosphere. The company should fold, and do it now.
If you have a small business and you are not participating in a discussion with your customers, your prospective customers, and the online society at large, you are not prepared for what could happen to your business.
If your first reaction is legal, you are living in the wrong century. The 71,000,000 bloggers are vocal and active. They are fast to close ranks against attackers, especially non-blogging attackers. Citizen journalism and advocacy is truly liberating, and repressive nineteenth century legal weapons will fail to stamp out negative information from a dispersed target.
