There’s a story in the NYT today about the Bear Stearns hedge fund hullabaloo, which isn’t unusual or noteworthy in an of itself—after all, we expect news from the New York Times.
However, Julie Creswell, the journalist who wrote it, clearly sat down and Googled the management involved before she wrote the article. I know this is what happened because
a) It’s exactly what I would do were I writing the article, and
b) it explains why she found Richard Marin’s blog:
In the midst of the turmoil, Richard Marin, the head of the Bear unit that ran the troubled funds, “stole away” from the “crisis-hedge-fund-salvation-workaholic weekend” to see the new Kevin Costner thriller “Mr. Brooks.”
His advice on the film?
Take a “pass,” Mr. Marin wrote in a review he posted that day on his blog, whimofiron.blogspot.com.
That’s in the first 100 words of the NYT article. This goes hand in hand with some of the social networking and personal presentation issues that Teresa has been musing about recently.
More importantly, employees are blogging—maybe not about your company or your product—but they are blogging, and the news media can find those blogs as easily as anyone else. Clearly this caught Bear Stearns by surprise:
A spokesman for the company said, “We have no comment on his personal blog.”
Having a corporate blogging policy is a great way to make sure that when the New York Times calls you up to ask about an employees blog, you aren’t caught flat-footed. We’re going to have an entire session on corporate blogging policies at our next conference.
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