On Monday June 16, 2008 Gail Geronimos had posted an article on her blog about Brent Frei (co-founder and chairman of the board at smartsheet.com) summarizing his very informative article that was posted to Venturebeat.com on April 21, 2008. She starts by stating that the article "was written by Brent Frei, founder of Bellevue."
Now mind you - the Bellevue she is referring to is my hometown that is located across Lake Washington from the major metropolitan city Seattle, WA. A few of us in the office got a chuckle out of Brent being the founder of Bellevue, WA - but in actuality it was founded in 1869 by William Meydenbauer.
This to me is yet another example of how the internet can be the misinterpretation of facts. Given that Gail Geronimos is from Australia she would have had no idea that Brent wasn't the founder of Bellevue, or even that Bellevue is a city all it's own. Through no fault of her own she had misinterpreted what she had read for at the bottom of the article Brent had posted stating "Brent Frei is founder of Bellevue, Wash.-based Smartsheet.com, a privately-held Software as a Service (SaaS) provider."
Remember the old rumor game that we played where we would whisper a statement into someone's ear and that person would then whisper to the person next to them, and so on until the person at the end would then say what they had been whispered out loud and it would never be what the original statement was said? Could it be that the internet is becoming the rumor mill that we experienced in our younger days?
It's up to us marketing and PR people to keep track of not only our company as a whole, but the company's representatives as well as our own personal interpretations.
...and no - I am not actually a Goddess, I just play one on IT ;o)
More and more companies are hiring agencies or even in-house teams to monitor the rumors that fly on the internet as quickly as they become posted. But with today's technology it's becoming increasingly difficult to catch all that there is out there...
Jenn
