When rumor has it (or not): thanks to blogs and other technologies, the rumor mill is churning faster than ever, How do you stop it?

For communicators, if media monitoring sounds like the digital equivalent of having an emergency unit always on standby, it is. But rather than be reactive, we should have our global antennae up and be able to collaborate with journalists before the sushi hits the ventilation system.

You've probably heard the adage that a lie can travel halfway round the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.

If you're a communicator whose job is to generate the corporate story, you don't want to be reminded how fast information--especially rumors--travels in our world of hypermedia. Urban legends and half-truths are not new phenomena, but in our wired world, they simply have more legs as the conduits feed into (and on) hundreds of media outlets. Companies have to scramble to find ways to manage their reputation, which brings a brand-new headache for brand guardians. All this will probably create a new type of communication manager. Chief surveillance officer, anyone?

A good illustration of this is a story about FedEx. In 2003, a news item on cable television misrepresented the company's earnings, suggesting that FedEx was not meeting Wall Street's expectations. Within a few minutes of the report, FedEx's stock dropped by nearly two dollars! Most companies deal with such coverage by demanding a correction the next day. But that's so after-the-fact. It's also out-of-sync with doing business in real time. We're operating in an infosphere where a CEO could get nailed for unethical or boorish behavior minutes after he makes a speech, because his words are blogged and distributed via RSS faster than you can say "Reuters report." (RSS is an XML format for syndicating web content. The acronym stands for one of the following standards: RDF Site Summary, Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication.)

Reactive or proactive?

FedEx, it turns out, subscribes to Critical Mention (www.criticalmention.com), one of the new breed of media monitoring services that keeps tabs on all mentions of a company in the news media. More than just clipping services, media monitoring and analysis are used not just by brand guardians, but also by PR companies on behalf of their clients and those handling investor relations. Critical Mention mainly covers broadcast media. Its web site explains: "When broadcast TV monitoring is a critical component to your reputation management ..., our cutting-edge technology delivers video clips of your broadcast mentions to your desktop within one minute of its airing."

That's pretty amazing stuff, considering that if you work for a global company, there could be mentions of your company's brand every minute of every day. It would be impossible for even a team of people glued to TV sets around the world, let alone one person, to keep tabs on what is being said in the broadcast arena. The monitoring technology enables someone to search archived content. It also allows you to share and archive these clips for yourself.

In the case of FedEx, PR managers were alerted when the story hit, and they went to work to correct the error. The share price climbed back.

For communicators, if this sounds like the digital equivalent of having an emergency unit always on standby, it is. But rather than be reactive, we should have our global antennae up and be able to collaborate with journalists before the sushi hits the ventilation system. Companies protecting their expensive product patents need this type of information, as do pharmaceutical companies that may need to have an early warning system for, say, medical breakthroughs in another corner of the world, or harmful drug interactions.

Monitoring services are very attractive to companies that want to protect their reputation. They are sensitive to the fact that in a world where media is everywhere, information travels outside of the predictable channels. And what are these channels? We're talking satellite radio, "podcasts," and the ease with which streaming video and audio can flow over wireless broadband connections. We're also talking about "Vblogs," or video web logs; though still rare, they could become a new channel as camera phones and other mobile video technologies become simpler and cheaper to use.

Just as the VHS era fades to black, press clipping services are moving beyond clippings into a more real-time product. BurrellesLuce (www.burrellesluce.com) now offers tracking and analysis via a desktop utility, plus the ability to format "media intelligence" from headline summaries and copies of news articles. "In this business, you need tomorrow's news yesterday," the company's web site says, almost breathlessly. VMS (www.vidmon.com), BurrellesLuce's partner, goes further, making available "crisis researchers" when a company needs closer monitoring of conventional and digital media. Another company, CyberAlert (www.cyberalert.com), covers 25,000-plus news sources in 17 languages and, true to its name, even monitors web message boards and Usenet news groups, those labyrinths of cyberspace where conversations take place.

No early warning system

Speaking of those dark and devious places where conversations about your company and mine are taking place, it's inevitable that a media monitoring service would roll out a product to monitor weblogs. There are not as many blogs as there are sites devoted to personal hang-ups and obscure passions. But with blogs now numbering in the millions, corporate brand managers have to be worried. Web-hosting companies now provide simple web-building packages that include a blog that can be set up in minutes. The simple way to monitor blogs is to subscribe to them using a free desktop-monitoring service such as an RSS news reader.

But bigger companies may need an industrial-strength monitoring service, because there is just no way for someone to manually keep tabs on the growing conversations out there. CyberAlert's BlogSquirrel, for example, will "automatically search and clip the new content in over 5 million blogs each day." It will also send "daily (or more frequent) reports of new blog postings containing key words you've specified." And it can help a company "build an effective 'early warning system' to identify problems and issues that may threaten corporate or brand reputation ... or present new opportunities for business growth."

Yet, as sophisticated as these services are, there is just no foolproof early warning system. Consider Starbucks, whose PR team went into overdrive when a story about corporate tax breaks became front-page news. It was not the blogging community that raised the ire of the Seattle coffee company. It was the U.S. Congress! The Senate scribes drafted a new tax bill and included a 27-word sentence about tax breaks for businesses. They gave it an unfortunate nickname: the Starbucks footnote. It referred to a loophole in the law for products manufactured in the U.S. It was a catchy phrase that, predictably, caught on.

How times have changed. In the old days, brand managers would find clever ways to get their company name out there. Today's managers must have sweaty palms every time they see their brand mentioned in the news, because it is often a story that didn't originate from their storybook.

Angelo Fernando is a freelance writer based in Tempe, Arizona, USA, covering business, marketing, media and technology. He can be reached at [e-mail].