Read an interesting article in the Jacksonville Business Journal entitled The silent killers in social media never die. That obviously caught my eye.
The essential point is that technology that didn't exist a half dozen years ago will be a big problem for companies like BP. Greenpeace recently had a contest to rebrand the BP logo which shows the company is not beyond petroleum - they're up to their necks in tar sands and deepwater drilling. They used Flickr as their conduit. The end result is that the negative perception of BP will extend throughout the internet and take on a life of it's own, causing PR issues for BP for a loooong time. The final sentence says it all: The is just one example among countless social media pastings of the BP brand, and they all get their impact from an easy-to-use tool, accessible to almost everyone in the developed world and will likely become more pervasive as time marches on.
Bottom line: social media brings things into the sunshine and the sun never sets . . .
Kem,
ReplyDeleteThis is another example of the power of the Web 2.0 world. This is putting more economic pressure on BP to do something.
Kem- I think the stakes are high when multi-billion dollar corporations take a black-eye. In the long run they can afford a lot of "justice".
ReplyDeleteIn spite of Benkler's rather reassuring take on Networked Democracy, I also pay attention to the work of groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation (http://www.eff.org/). They have taken up the mantle of defending digital freedom.