Microsoft gets smart
Another extract from Martin Thomas’s new book Crowdsurfing: Surviving and Thriving in the Age of Consumer Empowerment
At the last count over 5,000 Microsoft employees blogged. Almost none of them have been message trained or briefed by the legal team on what they can or cannot say and yet they talk to millions of Microsoft’s customers, competitors, media, partners, legislators, neighbours and other employees, every hour of every day. The PR and marketing departments have almost nothing to do with the output. They prefer to provide only guidance, in the form of what the company calls Blog Smart Principles, which are mercifully short.
And this from a company that is beset by people attacking it for a host of reasons, real or imagined, and always under intense media scrutiny and legislator pressure on both sides of the Atlantic. So how have they managed to enfranchise so many employees to talk from the company, and for the company, on so many subjects, without opening themselves up to lawsuits and negative press comment? How can all these Microsoft employees manage to tread the delicate line between the public and the private so successfully, a task that is usually only trusted to grizzled press officer professionals with years of experience under their belts; who can see media entrapment strategies and leading questions almost before they have been formed in the mind of the interviewer? The answer, if you ask some of those bloggers, is that the company “treats us like adults”.
Martin Thomas has spent 23 years running marketing communications agencies in PR, advertising, sponsorship, entertainment marketing and new media. The blog of the book is www.crowdsurfing.net
