OPEN

Silly season starting early at the FT?

While we’re always happy to see the "top companies blogging" story, this one from the FT today seems to be patched together from previous efforts, hanging off the slightly fresh angle that John Petter, BT’s COO will launch his blog soon, inspired by the likes of Charles Dunstone’s sort-of-blog. There’s Cillit Bang, GM and Dresdner Kleinwort all ressurected from the cuttings file…

But like I say, for those of us selling the dream to the UK’s business leaders, these sots of stories in the FT are always welcome. Shouldn’t sneer, seriously. Should be grateful and feel slightly vindicated.

Besides, it will be very interesting to see how Mr Petter approaches his blog when it launches. He certainly seems that he doesn’t mind making his views known when he is displeased. I don’t subscribe to Mr Dunstone’s, but it has caught the attention and to some extent the imagination of corporate communicators in other large companies.

 : : Actually Charles Dunstone’s "blog" is more of a traditional corp comms channel than a blog, in the sense of a blog being a part of social media. The lack of a comments section on it means that it is very one-sided, not conversational at all, allowing Mr Dunstone to make comments about his free broadband service such as this last Thursday:

It is interesting to note just how many complaints were made by our competitors rather than customers! My message to the competition remains – why don’t you worry about reducing your own prices to compete with us, rather than creating more work for the ASA and trying to stop us with technicalities!

The post is responding to the kerfuffle about whether "free" really meant "free". Meanwhile complaints about how poor people’s experience of the service is are not mentioned nor do blog posts about their frustrations even bother linking to his blog.

My mother and my wife’s parents both signed up for the free broadband offer. My mother gave up and cancelled her existing TalkTalk account after consistently appalling service – she’s now with BT. My parents-in-law were still waiting weeks (months) later for their free broadband to be installed.

Sounds worse than NTL – looks like BT for me with their 20 meg broadband, IPTV and the ability to answer the phone when you call them.

Tags: carphone warehouse, BT, blogs, FT