The internet is a great way to spread news about your company. And on a CSR level, the internet’s inherent transparency lends itself well to a company’s efforts to make their processes more transparent.
However this can work against a company when the news is bad and the methods less than transparent.
Case in point, American telecoms giant AT&T’s recent attempts via lobbyist Jim Cicconi to thwart increased regulation on the internet, known stateside as “net-neutrality rules’. The Washington Post has more:
Cicconi has criticized FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski’s push to strengthen and broaden rules for how Internet service providers treat content on their networks. Cicconi said such rules should not apply to wireless networks, which have less capacity than fixed wireline networks like cable. He has said that AT&T Mobility and other mobile broadband providers should not be strapped by new rules when it comes to managing broadband traffic congestion.
The other major stakeholder in this debate is Google. Here’s what they’ve got to say about it:
Fundamentally, net neutrality is about equal access to the Internet. In our view, the broadband carriers should not be permitted to use their market power to discriminate against competing applications or content. Just as telephone companies are not permitted to tell consumers who they can call or what they can say, broadband carriers should not be allowed to use their market power to control activity online. Today, the neutrality of the Internet is at stake as the broadband carriers want Congress’s permission to determine what content gets to you first and fastest. Put simply, this would fundamentally alter the openness of the Internet.
AT&T’s lobbyist is doing the company a great disservice by, in a round-about way, telling the company’s employees that they should protest unfettered access to the internet. Since AT&T signs their cheques, it makes it difficult for an employee to openly disobey something like this.
Because the internet is transparent, AT&T’s activities have been given wide-spread attention. It’s got similar traits as the Trafigura scandal that unfolded in the UK last week: A big company trying to have a say over information, or a vital service, the alternative of which is free-flowing information and data to all. Concerned citizens then took it upon themselves to spread the information, turning it from a footnote to a viral news item.
The take-away item from this for corporate entities is to understand fully the potential viral nature of an item of potentially bad PR. Because AT&T gave their lobbyist the mandate to distribute that message to more than 300,000 people, it was bound to leak. With the leak, and the contents of the leak, AT&T lost control of the messaging and opened the company up to wider, more cutting critiques from customers and media.
It’s likely that AT&T’s stance will begin to inform public opinion. However it’s unlikely to be in the way they had hoped.