Blogs vs. conventional communication

It's quite easy for your blog to cause trouble, and you may not even know it' happening.

Regional CIO blogged that he met the new Group CIO yesterday - and, he commented, many people in IT didn't even know we had a Group CIO. Is this a problem with the way we communicate appointments, he asked.

Group CIO's boss (v. senior director) gets to hear about this, assumes it's the fault of communications and asks communications director why we didn't publish the announcement.

Communications director immediately assumes her team has let her down and never published the announcement. (If that was the case it would be the first time in seven years that the team has let her down). She finds a different page published on a different date and assumes the deathless prose has been butchered. Accusations fly.

Reassurance. We did publish the announcement, the trouble is that not many people read it, and it was six weeks ago. Furthermore we have a comms plan for the group CIO starting with a profile on Monday.

Hmm. Strange absence of grovelling apology from the comms director.

Neither the blogger (Regional CIO), bloggee (Group CIO) or v. senior director know about any of this. Should we tell them? Don't know. Should they have communicated the appointment better themselves? Well, yes. Can a communications department cover up for managers failing to communicate to each other? Errr...