To respond or not to bloggers' sniping?
The "digital natives" are growing restless.
That spells trouble for embattled business leaders.
If they didn't have enough to fret about peddling their products and scrambling for credit in a brutal recession, they now confront a challenge to their companies' reputations, and their own, from the chatterers on Facebook, Twitter, and myriad blogs.
"There used to be a way to control information," said Brian C. Kenny, chief marketing and communications officer for Harvard Business School. "Control is now being released into the hands of citizen marketers and - I heard a term the other day - digital natives."
Those natives have taunted chief executives, bad-mouthed goods and services, and sullied the reputations of companies from Dell Inc. to Wal-Mart Stores Inc. to the Kryptonite unit of Ingersoll Rand Co. How to respond was the subject of a panel sponsored by the public relations firm Weber Shandwick last week at the Downtown Harvard Club.
Kenny, one of the panelists, warned that taking an attitude of "indifference or ambivalence" toward the online sniping could backfire. Executives might wonder, "Boy, there's all this noise out there. Who are these people that spend all this time writing on these blogs? And don't they have jobs, and don't they have something better to do?" Kenny suggested. "I would caution against falling into that trap of feeling like this is not something that you need to pay a lot of attention to."
Kryptonite, based in Canton, learned the hard way. It had to replace 380,000 bicycle locks around the world after a website revealed how to hack into them with a ballpoint pen. Dell was dinged by its own employees and former employees grousing on Facebook, the social-networking site. And Wal-Mart, like dozens of other consumer businesses, is frequently the target of disparaging blogs.
While the initial audience for a leaked memo or an e-mail forwarded to a discussion board may be small, controversies spread rapidly on the Internet and are magnified when picked up by mainstream media. Sixty-seven percent of executives surveyed by Weber Shandwick saw their brands as vulnerable in this new environment.
Leslie Gaines-Ross, who led the survey and holds the title of chief reputation strategist for Weber Shandwick in New York, said "online reputation management" has emerged as a key discipline.
"Companies and their leaders are living in glass houses," said Gaines-Ross, citing a gusher of leaked documents sprouting on websites. "How do you communicate today when you're living in a glass house? There are absolutely no company secrets. And there are no digital erasers."
While most captains of commerce recognize the pitfalls of social media, they often have little understanding of how they work and whether, or how, they can be used to engage customers and employees.
"People are online and they're coming together, and they have a lot of power now because they're able to create content," said John Cass, a Boston communications professional who wrote a book on corporate blogging. "Those communities of people online are working within the ecosystem of how the Web works . . . It just so happens that some of the social-media technologies that are out there, such as blogs, are perfectly designed for getting high rankings on search engines."
While it's impossible to erase critical commentary on the Internet, companies can build an "infrastructure" to monitor the blogosphere, triage potential threats, and participate in the digital dialogue through corporate blogs and online forums seeking feedback, Cass said. He said they also can reach out to corporate scolds by engaging in dialogue on their blogs and websites.
Sometimes, though, companies can overreact and wind up amplifying a small-bore Internet squabble. Companies need to move quickly to counter falsehoods and to address complaints about product defects or customer service, but run-of-the-mill grumbling may not require a similar effort. Determining when to respond, and when to let a controversy fade on its own, is often the toughest decision.
John Carroll, professor of mass communication at Boston University and senior media analyst for WBUR-FM, recalled how he was "flame-broiled on the Internet" for missing the satire in a blog he cited on television. Carroll chose not to fire back, but acknowledged he might have made a mistake. "What I decided to do - and I don't recommend this - was not to respond because I thought there is just no bottom to that well," he said. "You'll never win getting into spitting matches with these people. And they have a lot more time on their hands than I do."
The flare-up eventually became a distant memory, though it can still be resurrected on Google.
Carroll added a postscript: "One of the people who was sandblasting me for an entire week on his local political blog actually eight months later tried to friend me on Facebook."
Robert Weisman can be reached at weisman@globe.com. 
