Scandal or no scandal

I recently witnessed (and was involved in) an interesting case of what seems to look like a blog scandal, although I wouldn't exactly call it that.

A few weeks ago, I used my company's blog to post something about McCann PR (our Weber Shandwick affiliated PR agency) looking for an account exec - nothing out of the ordinary just yet, seeing that it's become common practice, and it always pays off.

Somewhere along the way, within a day or two of posting the announcement, we got a trackback and a comment suggesting that before anyone looks into a job opportunity at our company, they should read something first. The blog, which had been started one week prior to this, related a series of events in which our HR department allegedly called in people for a Junior Copywriter position, but by the time they got to the meeting, told them that the position had already been occupied. Then the bloke started giving other examples, and ended up writing a 2-page piece on how crappy and preferential our agency's recruitment process is. Comments from anonymous people quickly followed (they did provide a link in our more visited blog).

Basically, the rant was that our advertising agency (along with the entire industry) is very difficult to get into, and usually, it only works if you know somebody who knows somebody who is told to hire you - an endless cat and mouse game of what (and just how good) connections someone has.

Our reaction came about pretty quickly, from our CEE Creative Director, whom, noticing the blogger's frustration that he hadn't managed to get into our creative department, assured him that only he and the Associate Creative Director are directly responsible for recruiting people in the aforementioned department, and proposed to send out a test - right there, as a comment - and expect an answer on that same blog, to keep everything transparent.

His comment was perceived as extremely arrogant by the blogger, and generated yet another post, in which he (weirdly) did an entire logical analysis of how his question hadn't been answered. And from then on, a series of (tens) of incoherent comments from an apparently large number of people (most of them anonymous, of course), which some of our colleagues eventually picked up and replied to, from time to time.

And last time I checked, they were still wondering why we hadn't provided them with an official response. I guess that regional management figures aren't considered official enough.

This is a case study I'll be properly building - as the aftermath is also interesting. Some said that we shouldn't have even bothered answering, others said that we should have provided a reply on our blog (which would've meant giving them a lot of extra traffic - uncalled for, I'd say), and others said that we were indeed too arrogant and should've been more swift and to the point. Most people, though, said that it was a perfectly normal reaction and that it's important that we pay attention to everyone interested (one way or another) in us.

Somehow, I don't see it as a blog scandal. It was more like a collective rant on a no-name blog (and one blog alone). Objections?

[pic via]