Corporate America on the rack

Reported in the Financial Times February 7 2005
Verizon is taken to court in a civil class action - which signals to large corporations - that the customer is clearly in the driving seat. The FT reports

the lawsuit against Verizon Wireless - and the way it came about - highlights the challenges that weblogs pose to corporations.

Verzion advertised the Motorola V710 with Bluetooth this made it possible for file sharing between the mobile device and a computer. Verizon However turned the bluetooth functionality off.
This case has been identified as being possible purely through the power of the blogosphere and the millions that provide such overwhelming force via "word of mouth"
The FT quote Robert Scoble a very popular blogger

If companies don't understand that and don't learn how to track what people are saying, they are going to be hit violently with PR problems that they don't understand or know where they are coming from

Other cases recently which demonstrate community power is the the case kryptonite - As Robert Scoble says just type in the words Kryptonite and bic pen and see what you get.
Of course, in the UK there is a danger we will pooh pooh such fripperies as blogging merely as the blatherings of some techno geeks. But as any strategist will tell you, the worse thing that can happen to you is irrelevance which is always the precursor to obsolescence. And that is a one way street.

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