On the Internet, rumors, misinformation, leaks, smear campaigns, rogue Web sites, and other high-profile postings are epidemic. Companies and the issues that affect them are being publicly discussed by more than 30 million people worldwide. There are, however, no editors in cyberspace. Communication is direct, unfiltered, and fast.
The initial reaction to an adverse situation on the Internet is panic, fear, and a strong desire to shut them down. The reality is that these situations are opportunities for companies to publicly demonstrate their character by resolving customer problems that may have gone unresolved or getting their side of the story across in a way that was not possible before.
There are two points of origination for Internet crises. Mrs. Fields Cookies was once falsely rumored on Hard Copy and CNN to have supplied free cookies to O.J. Simpson"s criminal trial victory party. Within eight minutes of the Hard Copy broadcast, a boycott of the company was being organized on the Internet. Intel"s Pentium well-known chip flaw, on the other hand, took three weeks of discussion on the Internet"s Usenet newsgroups to build up enough momentum before it appeared as a story on the front page of The Wall Street Journal.
Crises that originate in traditional media that jump to the Internet, such as the false Mrs. Fields rumor, grow quickly and require less work on the part of the organizers to build support. Unlike traditional media however, where the journalist serves as intermediary and filter, the Internet enables both sides to tell their stories directly to the affected audiences.
While the Internet possesses the ability to catalyze, organize, and polarize large numbers of people quickly, the very nature of the medium ensures that corporate activism originating on the Internet, such as the Intel debacle, will almost universally start out at a manageable level. Webmasters of activist Web sites have the same challenge as their corporate brethren: if you build it but don"t tell anyone about it, no one will come. Companies that monitor the electronic bulletin boards on the Internet and on commercial online services such as Prodigy, CompuServe, Microsoft Network, and America Online routinely discover the postings of disgruntled customers, employees, investors, and other activists seeking to build grassroots support for their causes.
Herein lies the opportunity to resolve the situation, before it grows to a scope that costs a company serious dollars and reputational damage. There are three steps to follow for identifying and neutralizing potentially destructive, widely disseminated Internet rumors and misinformation: Diagnosis, Prescription, and Treatment. Это и многое другое вы найдете в книге Corporate Activism on the Internet : Rogue Activist Web Sites (James E. Lukaszewski, James M. Alexander)