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‘Forbes’s Trashy Blog Attack’
October 28, 2005 | 7:45 am
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By David Rothman
Over the years, Forbes at times has printed some pretty clueful stuff. Although far more liberal than Forbes, I’ve cherished the magazine’s pokes at the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extention Act.
Still, even good publications can let us down–and that’s exactly what happened with Attack of the Blogs (reg. required). Excerpt:
“Bloggers are more of a threat than people realize, and they are only going to get more toxic. This is the new reality,” says Peter Blackshaw, chief marketing officer at Intelliseek, a Cincinnati firm that sifts through millions of blogs to provide watch-your-back service to 75 clients, including Procter & Gamble and Ford. “The potential for brand damage is really high,”says Frank Shaw, executive vice president at Microsoft’s main public relations firm, Waggener Edstrom. “There is bad information out there in the blog space, and you have only hours to get ahead of it and cut it off, especially if it’s juicy.”
Gosh, I’d hope Microsoft and friends would be monitoring this blog. As both a consumer and co-founder of the OpenReader Consortium, I’ve love to see ‘em improve the problematic Microsoft Reader, and, in fact, we do get our share of accesses from microsoft.com. Even better, over at Adobe, Bill McCoy has started his own blog and we’re in a dialogue now. That’s how it should be. No need for stealth. Bill agrees that the e-books need to be changed, and I’ll be delighted if he can act on the ideas here. Simply put, for responsive companies, blogs can help improve products. The best way to protect a brand is to make it better.
Meanwhile Dan Gillmore has some pithy thoughts on”Forbes’s Trashy Blog Attack.” Excerpt from Dan’s post:
Do bloggers sometimes go too far? Of course. But if the best-read bloggers typically did work of the lousy quality shown in the Forbes stories, they’d be pilloried — appropriately so.
I won’t waste a lot of time deconstructing these hit pieces, which make a few good points but are otherwise riddled with exaggeration, misstatements and worse.
Related: The Blog Herald’s take on the Forbes article.
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Comments:
[...] David Rothman quotes Dan Gilmor’s title, Forbes’ Trash Blog Attack and goes on to say: Still, even good publications can let us down–and that’s exactly what happened with Attack of the Blogs. [...]
You have to admit that there’s some truth in the Forbes article. There are a lot of nutcases out there who do “spew lies, libel and invective” against companies — some of whom may not deserve it.
But let’s get real about where this citizen anger is coming from.
How many dollars, after all, have we all wasted on shoddy products and overhyped stocks? How many hundreds of hours
have we all frittered away just trying to get our measly little customer service complaints addressed? How much outright lying and patronizing indifference have we all had to put up
with in pro-business media reporting, corporate press
releases, and those infamous “we’re all just one happy
family” employee newsletters?
And just so we get the context right, how many people have been killed by automobiles with exploding gas tanks or high rollover rates because companies deemed it “cost-ineffective” to correct these defects?
What Forbes is really pointing to is this: Blogging represents the revolt of the voiceless against the heedless.
And until companies start listening to their customers better — blogs being an excellent way to start — citizen anger is going to continue to bubble in the heartland.
Oh so true, David. Thanks for your thoughts.