So important to write what you know. And to trust that you know something about something better than others. This savvy guy watched mortgage lenders tank, and fired up this implode-o-meter to track them – 265 as of 07/08/08. The site includes a terribly tacky recording from Family First Mortgage, informing employees by VOICE MAIL they had been terminated (Play the message here, courtesy of the NYT). How uncouth!
No such reporter tracker exists yet. Maybe this girl’s the one to do that, putting herself on the list, at, I’d guess, 2,056 in recent years (totally made that up). But here’s what all companies should learn from the Times story and the Meter’s founder, Aaron Krowne:
Mr. Krowne can hardly suppress a laugh when describing the recording. What surprises him is that failing companies seem to put on “Herculean efforts” to convince the rest of the world, and their own employees, that they are sound.
“Every company thinks it is different,” Mr. Krowne says. He points to April last year as an example. Employees of SouthStar Funding, a mortgage company in Atlanta, bombarded him with phone calls at his day job, trying to persuade him that the company was fine after he placed it on his Ailing Lender list, he said. After all, the employees told him, they were being sent on a team-building trip to the Bahamas. Soon, Mr. Krowne said, he started getting threats from the company.
When SouthStar folded, Mr. Krowne wrote: “I have to say that it is with genuine satisfaction that I post this report of SouthStar’s closure.”
It’s a journalism rule, too.
Show, don’t tell.
Vigorous protests only put employees on edge and get the gossip going overtime, a la, “Me thinks the lady doth protest too much.”
