Handbook of Corporate Communication and Public ... - Blogs Unpad

Public website
Extranet
Internal data and knowledge
Figure 19.1 Information flows in an organization
as organizations become more transparent.
These easy communication lines create
opportunities for sensitive information to
‘escape’ and this can be the cause of varying
degrees of embarrassment and corporate
compromise.
Our organizations are becoming much
more transparent. Companies publishing
press releases for the convenience of the press
and public automatically make them available
to competitors. This is just one example, there
are hundreds including comparisons of price,
product and service that can be made by competitors
as well as consumers, employees and
many other publics.
Information that ‘leaks’ out of organizations
is called porosity. Examples of porosity
can be found in emails leaked to the press (the
Martin Sixsmith/Stephen Byers debacle in the
United Kingdom included emails being leaked
from the Department of Transport, Local
Government and the Regions).
People using newsgroups and discussion
lists at work and at home, frequently comment
about their companies to people they
do not know and who may live on the other
side of the world or a street away. People
(and technologies) can use, amend, annotate
and juxtapose this information, the internet
can act as an agent of change to alter, spread
and misapply corporate messages and information(Figure
19.2). 4
Protecting organizations with
employee awareness campaigns
We can learn lessons from the US government’s
approach to crisis and its analysis of
the threat.
© 2004 Sandra Oliver for editorial matter and selection;
individual chapters, the contributors