A little more cluetrain

"Companies will survive employees telling their truths, their stories in a business context, without instituting draconian controls on their ability to speak out when and to whom they please. We listen to individuals differently than we do to organizational speech. When a company publishes PR, it's trying to give us a complete message about who they are and what they do. We have to decide to trust or distrust the company based on a single statement. Well-written PR leaves us with few avenues for corroboration and second opinions. It's meant to be self-contained.

"On the other hand, when I converse with people inside a company, I hear stories from individuals. They're all grains of sand, their combined voices richer and more diverse than the univocal speech of corporate mouthpieces. We add up all the anecdotes we hear from individuals. We have to trust our own averaging, our own summing of stories, our own divining of truth. With more people, more stories in the mix, it's harder for one negative story to sway me. This speaks to the need to have many people in an organization talking to customers. A single "corporate story" is a fiction in a world of free conversation. [from chapter three of The Cluetrain Manifesto]

This blog is intended to be one more voice in a diocese where the "corporate story" has serious conflicts with reality. An example of this that I have mentioned earlier is the mischaracterization of a parish action at St. Andrew's Church in Vestal, NY. An article in the diocesan newspaper about diocesan convention stated that St. Andrew's had withheld money from the diocese in 2004 as a protest about a diocesan action in 2003. I had explained at diocesan convention that we didn't have any such money to withhold, but either the article writer had not heard that or decided that what I said wasn't true. What I said can be verified by our parish financial records that are audited every year and summarized in an annual parochial report. Do I expect a retraction on the false statement?

I would be very surprised if the mistatement in the diocesan newspaper was ever acknowledged. This is why we need free conversation, like this blog.