By Geoff Fein
Despite an embarrassing false-start recently into the blogosphere, Boeing [BA] is continuing to look at ways to upgrade its presence on the Internet including the use of social media, a company official said.
Boeing has launched several websites dealing with a variety of topics including the C-17, the KC-747 tanker, and Ground Based Midcourse Defense, Dan Beck, a Boeing a spokesman, told Defense Daily yesterday.
Beck said Boeing is moving toward implementing a blog in the coming months. “It will be a Boeing-branded site, telling the Boeing story.
“We’ll have a finished product after the first of the year but it will evolve both in look and content,” he said. “We are still looking at how it will be structured.”
Beck emphasized that the company’s blog won’t compete with the mainstream media. In fact, his hope is that media will use the blog as a resource.
“It’s an opportunity to tell our story,” he said.
Boeing had tentatively planned to launch Defensedialogue.com, one of many efforts the company was exploring, to provide commentary.
However, the effort floundered when Doug Cantwell, a company spokesman who worked out of one of Boeing’s Washington state facilities, preregistered for the Association for Unmanned Vehicles System International (AUVSI) symposium, in August, as an “independent blogger” for the nascent social media project (Defense Daily, Aug. 19).
By not identifying himself as a Boeing employee, Cantwell went against company policy, Beck said in August. “Boeing policy is clear.”
Cantwell attended Northrop Grumman [NOC] briefings on unmanned systems on Global Hawk and the Broad Area Maritime Surveillance (BAMS) systems Aug. 11 and for Unmanned Combat Air System (UCAS) and Bat the following day, according to an industry source. After the Bat briefing on Aug. 12, a member of the trade press alerted a Northrop Grumman communications representative that Cantwell had attended the briefing, the source added. After being confronted by his former employer, Cantwell admitted that he was writing for the blog Defensedialogue.com and registered as an “independent blogger” for the symposium, the source added. Northrop Grumman contacted AUVSI officials, who confirmed that Cantwell was registered as media and had not disclosed that he was a Boeing employee. Northrop Grumman officials told Cantwell that his attendance was a professional breach of courtesy, the source said (Defense Daily, Aug. 19).
The company began an internal investigation into the matter.
“We don’t discuss details of internal investigations, but we did conduct a review,” Beck said yesterday. “It confirmed our original view that this was an isolated but unfortunate issue.
“Part of what we uncovered during the internal investigation was that the intent was being misrepresented,” he added. “It was not meant to be a non-Boeing site.”
He added that any new effort won’t carry the Defensedialogue name. “It was a notional name.”
According to Beck, Cantwell voluntarily resigned from Boeing in October.
Additionally, former BusinessWeek writer Stanley Holmes, whom Boeing hired as a corporate communicator and led the Defensedialogue.com effort, also voluntarily left the company last month, Beck added.
If there is an upside to the event, Beck said it’s that Boeing recognizes the need to move into social media.
“We’ve been moving cautiously as we work to understand this,” he said. “Want to make sure that what we do as a company sends the right message to Boeing employees as well.”
Boeing’s current Internet efforts can be seen at: http://c17foramerica.com/? gclid=CN6O95iH8p0CFaRN5wod2n4uxw; or http://www.unitedstatestanker.com/.