A new wave of corporate dissent

I was gonna take a blogger's holiday today, but saw this and just couldn't resist.

Instapundit tipped us to a Kausfiles column regarding a spat between General Motors corporate PR department and the New York Times letters to the editor department. Their back-and-forth was in response to a Thomas Friedman hit piece on GM last week, blogged about here. Amazingly, the interchange made GM look like the guys in white hats. What's going on here?

First off, as a GM vehicle owner it's bizarre to think I'd ever type out a column in their defense. I'd more believe any time spent typing would be devoted solely to chewing out a division manager about an unfixed problem or to the NHTSA people complaining about lack of recalls on crappy factory equipment (like those defective windshield wiper motors stuck on certain year-models, but I digress). However, this story represents more than defending GM, it's about a new frontier in corporate communications.

In this new world petty spats like the one in GM's BLOG make it darn near impossible for old line MSM entities to fire away verbal trebuchets against large targets while effectively crushing or manipulating the returning dissent. In reading the exchange, who doesn't feel sorry for the behemoth corporation?

In the old days this type of thing would have dropped on the floor and been filed away in the corporate mind for later use. Today they can simply do an 'end run' around these intransigent human firewalls through use of bloggers. Why wait? After all, I read the story then typed up this piece, and so will thousands or even millions of other bloggers. Think of all those sites, all of those readers, all of those trackbacks, all of those links. It's exponentialism.

There are drawbacks and pitfalls to this new method, but if done correctly and honestly it's hard not to like this immediate and open form of resolution. Surely it's an advertising bargain, as well.