Blogger In The Midst

A Blogger in Their Midst

Introduction

Glove Girl, who's an assistant foreman at a surgical glove manufacturing plant, blogs about the company's products on her personal blog with inside information. However, she blogs without permission and without following the company rules.She achieves more audience than the official marketing campaigns and upstages the company's CEO at a major trade show. When she says something positive about a line of gloves, sales increase. When she blogs she questions about the company's ethics of doing business with a clinic with a poor record, the deal is in danger.

SWOT Analysis

Strengths

Today Glove Girl is the company's biggest strength. She has turned into Lancaster-Webb's most cost-effective marketer. In much less time and with fewer resources, she does what the marketing department could not even after spending big chunks of the corporate budget. She gets customers to listen and believe. Something which has resulted in

Blogging, as the Glove Girl has illustrated, is a new avenue for marketing and is something that the company has capitalized upon.

The company has a very good public image.

Weakness

There are management and internal communications problems at Lancaster-Webb, as the management is not sharing information amongst them.

There is too much reliance on Glove girl as a tool to market the company.

The Marketing team is not updated with the latest technologies which can be used for proper marketing of their products.

Opportunities

Glove girl can be used as a spokesperson of the company as she has an excellent public image.

Blogging as a new avenue for marketing has lots of potential and it should be tapped.

The marketing department can always look for newer modes of marketing like SMS, e-mails etc and should try to be ahead of their competition.

Threats

Apart from being the Organization's strength, Glove girl is also a threat - she can create a lot of HAVOC with the highly classified information that she possesses. Access to such classified information coupled with the fact that she has a very good rapport with the public makes her Larger-than-company.

The Marketing team is relying too much on glove girl for short-term benefits rather than focusing

upon marketing strategies, which would lead to the fulfilment of long-term goals.

The blog does not make it clear whether the company acknowledges it. This makes it very ambiguous and people going by the girl's screen name assume that it's officially recognized.

The Vice President, Marketing is going out of his way by relying too much on the glove girl without taking his seniors into confidence. This encourages loss of authority & a mismatch of power in the organization.

Problem identification

Employees' Blogging to express their personal beliefs and viewpoints would seriously affect the company's image in the long run. Being a new phenomenon, it does not have any literature on it.

The Vice-President, Marketing is not communicating with his superiors on sensitive matters regarding the organization.

Solutions

Solutions to the problem can be at two different levels. At the first level, we would have to deal with the glove girl and at the second level, with the Vice President, Marketing.

There can be many solutions to this problem while dealing with Glove girl. These are as follows:-

1.As breach of confidentiality has occurred, the company can fire the girl. But this could have serious repercussions as the public would think that the girl has been punished for speaking the truth. Also as the girl has access to highly secret information, she can cause a lot of public embarrassment for the company.

2.Another option could be to legally hire the girl and bind her by rules so that she would write only what the company wants her to write. But that would