A front page story in the April 24th Wall Street Journal entitled Critical Case: How an Email Rant Jolted a Big HMO provides a crash course in the difficulties of message control in the 21^st century.  The article describes the attempts by health care giant Kaiser Permanente to deal with a single e-mail written by a disgruntled 22 year old employee.     As reported, a junior IT staffer fired off a 2,000 word e-mail to all 120,000 Kaiser employees in which he questioned the wisdom of the firm’s $4 billion program to digitize its paper records. The message pointed harsh fingers at Kaiser’s chief executives.   In the past, we know how this story would end. Whether the company-wide message took the form of an e-mail, a tacked up poster in the lunch room, or a bull horn in the parking lot, the result would be the same. The crusading junior employee would soon be unemployed and the mega-corporation would chug along as if nothing had happened.   

Welcome to the brave new world….   Rather than taking a passive approach Kaiser showed a willingness to mobilize rapidly and to fight fire with fire. Unfortunately they simply ended up with a larger fire.  

Kaiser immediately refuted the employees’ accusations in its own company wide e-mail, and proactively contacted trade magazines to explain how their digitization project was, in fact, a model of success. Going further, Kaiser paid Google to place a special Kaiser link on the top of any page returning search results for the employees’ name, and even launched the fast response “KP News Center” website.   However, all of this was unable to keep the story from mushrooming.   Faster than a speeding bullet the crusading employee’s e-mail appeared on Kaiser employee websites, chat rooms, health care websites, Wikipedia, and in health care trade magazines. In the months that followed,  the e-mail was cited in stories in the Los Angeles Times and ComputerWorld magazine and the Wall Street Journal itself.  

Ironically, the same junior employee had previously drawn criticism at Kaiser for burnishing Kaiser’s Wikipedia entry with laudatory information about the firm. Perhaps the employee became bitter over the company’s rejection of his unauthorized cyber-boosterism, and sought revenge by turning those skills against the firm.   In any event, the lessons from this event are difficult to discern. Whether Kaiser’s reaction was appropriate is hard to say. Most likely they were groping in the dark as any similarly sized public-company would do.  The real lesson is that we are living in a world where all communications is potentially mass communication, and that potent attacks on a firm’s reputation can come from any and all directions.  

-Andrew Schiff