I started my marketing consulting business in 2004. For the previous 10 years, I had been employed, in various capacities, and under various corporate owners, at a web and email filtering company. My last position was head of marketing.
I really love what I am doing now, and after my blog reading today, I am doubly, triply glad I no longer manage the public relations function at a filtering company.
Today, BoingBoing effectively declared war on filtering company Secure Computing, the maker of SmartFilter (and by the way, that is not where I worked. If it were, I would not be writing this post.)
It seems Secure is including BoingBoing in its “nudity” category, resulting in the wildly popular blog being blocked lots of places, including entire countries that use the Secure product. You can get the details at BoingBoing.
For the record, I think Secure made the wrong decision here, both in the initial decision and the way they handled the issue with the BoingBoing team. And it is really going to hurt them. There are legitimate reasons for using filtering software, but I won’t go into them now. This post is not about filtering software. If you’re that interested, google me and some of the older results will be my public statements and testimony on the subject.
What I am interested in are the PR and business implications. Because this will end up being more than just a PR firestorm that will blow over in a few weeks. This will become a business nightmare. Blogs are going to spread the word further faster and more furiously than we ever faced in the old days of the Communications Decency Act. And the folks at BoingBoing have much more clout — through the blog and their other business and personal interests — than any of the opponents the filtering companies faced before.
Figure it out fast, Secure — blogs are more than just “personal diaries” and now, you’ve got the most popular one in the world gunning for you.
Like I said, glad I’m outta this space!!!!!
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