I was reading the posted letter from Jim Dornan of Network 21 at the Amway Media Blog and ran across a couple of sentences that sounded interesting to me:
We live in a world that is far more complex than many of us are used
to. We must now adjust our actions and strategies to assure we are
delivering the right messages with integrity and responsibility. Please
help me to continue to seek careful and responsible communications
regarding this issue.
I can’t help but think that Mr. Dornan is talking about the fact that people now find out about "actions and strategies" via blogs. Blogs are the new word of mouth and the information travels a lot faster than before. For example, somewhere in the neighborhood of 5,000 unique people will look at this post before the end of the week.
What seems telling about the statement above is that "now" the system leaders must "adjust our actions and strategies" to assure that "integrity and responsibility" come through in the messages that are being reported.
My question: What were they doing before "now" and would they care about integrity and responsibility if not for the blog coverage of their actions?
Of course they do. What I'm discovering in my conversations with some system "insiders" is that they simply didn't understand the magnitude of what was happening and how it affects their businesses. They look at a site like mine, or yours, see only a handful of folk posting, don't realise there's thousands upon thousand of hidden "lurkers" reading these messages. To date they've thought the myths and misconceptions could be ignored because there really didn't seem to be that many people noticing. Hopefully I'm getting through to them that Yager was right – in many cases, facts don't matter. It's what people are the facts that often matter the most. It's taken the corp. years to realise this and engage the internet. Hopefully it doesn't take the systems as long again.