A Hard Lesson

Ingersoll-Rand learned a hard lesson when it failed to respond to a digital assault by a blogger.  It cost them $10 million.  Now they have a person monitoring blogs. 

How long before other companies realize that monitoring blogs is essential for a company's health? 

They might want to read how bloggers can lay waste to a product by Joshua Jaffee in today's C/NET

Today, most corporations still do little, if anything, with blogs, wikis and social networks, but that will change quickly over the next few years as more companies integrate these technologies into their daily routines. And if early signs are any indication, the evolution will lead to blogs replacing blast e-mails, wikis strengthening collaboration software and social networks taking conversations around the water cooler to a meta-level never envisioned by the most enthusiastic evangelist of the Internet boom.