Twitter, Facebook, websites, blogs – just how many choices are there nowadays to get your business message across, your opinions aired? What an extraordinary publishing age we are living through which is light and dark at the same time.
There are so many soapboxes to choose from and we can all be heard.
But a word of caution. Use it very wisely.
I was trained as a journalist in the seventies, when every spit and comma was pawed over by at least one sub-editor before it was printed. To be allowed to write something in the first place I had to pass a fistful of exams, one of which was on the laws of libel.
I went on to become a sub-editor and then an editor, a profession which meant you had to know the rules or you would end up in court and face an alarming bill for costs and damages, or worse.
Now anyone can publish themselves in the blink of an eye and I have read several things online of late that made me blow out my cheeks. These were hard-hitting views rattled off by people in business. Nothing wrong with that necessarily, but when you start negatively naming companies, individuals or brands, even by implication if not outright, you could be venturing into actionable territory.
It is so easy to do in the heat of the moment – tap tap tap tap, enter – and so hard to mend. The law has yet to get a handle on this explosion in publishing, but it will, so never publish in haste.
Better still, stick to the positives about what you do well, but equally resist the temptation to embroider.
Personally, I find this great flurry of words as deafening and riotous as the floor of a stock exchange. People who are brief,positive and don’t get embroiled in mud-slinging shine all the brighter to me.
