In the social-media age, bosses’ careers are more vulnerable than ever
This is why net neutrality is so important, and why the 1% wants to see it go away.
http://www.economist.com/news/business/21623676-social-media-age-bosses-careers-are-more-vulnerable-ever-beware-angry-birds?fsrc=nlw|hig|9-10-2014|NA
The New Yorker magazine ran a cartoon last year of three monkeys in a row: one with a microphone (labelled “hear all evil”), one with a television camera (“see all evil”) and one with a laptop (“post all evil”). Today’s bosses still need to worry about the unwise monkeys of the press. But as big a threat to their careers these days is the risk of being pecked by Twitter’s swarm of angry birds. Thanks to the digital revolution, chief executives now live in glass houses. An ill-judged remark can be broadcast to the world in an instant. An unwise “reply all” can provide sensitive information to a competitor. An exasperated complaint in the midst of a crisis can seal your doom. Tony Hayward, who was boss of BP during the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, never recovered from his plea that “I want my life back”.
The digital revolution has dramatically shifted the balance of power from companies to their critics. Although big firms deploy armies of PR flacks, anyone with a smartphone and a socialmedia account now has the same power to reach a global audience. Whistleblowers once had to photocopy documents and smuggle them out in their underpants. Now they can be shared with the world in a trice, by e-mail or instant messaging.
Anti-corporate campaigners have taken to the digital world like ducks to water. NGOs are good at finding bad news about companies and telling the world about it on social media. Opportunists have also joined the ducks in the water: there is money to be made by “shorting” a stock (that is, betting that its price will go down) and then unleashing a value-destroying digital storm.
By contrast, companies have failed to adapt. The biggest of businesses with the slickest of publicity operations, from McDonald’s to JPMorgan Chase, British Gas to Qantas, have found that when they tried engaging with tweeters on their home turf, they were drowned in a sea of sarcasm. British Gas’s attempt at an online discussion about its price rises was met with a barrage of tweets mentioning “death” and “greed”. Presumably they will get better eventually. But in “Glass Jaw: A Manifesto for Defending Fragile Reputations in an Age of Instant Scandal”, Eric Dezenhall, an American crisis-management consultant, points to two big reasons why companies are condemned to play catch-up.
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