Should Northern Rock have a blog?

Posted over 2 years ago by Jon Mell
18/09/2007

The BBC web site broke the Northern Rock emergency loan story on Thursday 13th September. It was not until Sunday 16th September that Adam Applegarth posted a one page letter on the front of the Northern Rock web site explaining the situation to his customers; that Northern Rock had only requested that a lending facility be made available to them, they had not actually needed to withdraw any money and that his customers' deposits were safe. During that 4-day span the public took all their information from the media, who used words such as 'dramatic' and 'unprecedented' which no doubt...

Blogs as whistleblowers

Posted over 2 years ago by Jon Mell
17/09/2007

There is a story on the BBC News website about an exasperated police officer who blogged about having to spend too much time doing paperwork whose identity has now been exposed. According to the story - he "risked his job" to write the Policeman's blog, and only now, as he leaves the UK to move to Canada, has his identity be revealed.This poses interesting questions around the extend to which organisations should police the on-line activities of their employees when they comment about their organisation outside of work. The situation is perhaps more sensitive when the organisation is a public...

The art of sales

Posted over 2 years ago by Jon Mell
15/09/2007

The other day I went to a fascinating event hosted by Clarify Solutions. It was a guest panel discussing issues around how to build and measure high performance sales and marketing teams in software. This was actually quite an interesting experience in its own right, both in terms of the people present at the event and the people on the panel, all highly experienced and able individuals. One of the most interesting questions that came up was whether an outstanding sales rep is born or trained.I'd recently had a similar conversation with a colleague who almost took offence at the...