Corporate blog not the place for GM strike

One “downside” of having a corporate blog is that your customers/clients/readers etc may have gotten used to having a dialogue with your company and their expectations on your communications probably have increased. In a situation like the ongoing national strike against GM, many people would probably hope to find comments from the auto maker on one of its corporate blogs. Now, there are of course situations when it is difficult to be as open as you would wish and this appears to be one of them.

Christopher Barger, Director, GM Global Communications Technology, therefore made a short comment on the GM FastLane Blog:

“We’ve seen a number of comments coming in regarding this situation, and we appreciate the interest and opinions that you, our readers, have about this matter. But as I am sure that you can appreciate, these are sensitive times involving sensitive negotiations; a public blog is not the appropriate place for us to be commenting about them, nor do we think it’s constructive to entertain a discussion of labor issues here.

This afternoon, we issued a statement regarding the UAW’s decision; to this point, that is our only statement on the topic. Any future comments we have will be issued via press statement, and not here on FastLane. Thanks for understanding.”

Although one could always hope for more openness, at least this is a good way of managing expectations.

Via Shel Holtz.

Update: What GM does, however, is link to other blogs. For example, Trollhattan Saab is an independent blog that comments on the strike here.

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