How to blog yourself out of a Job...

Here comes a brand new worst practice case for weblog PR: It all started when Michael Hanscom posted an innocent little entry on his weblog.

Working in the print shop of the Microsoft Redmond campus, he witnessed the delivery of several G5s from Apple !? "Wow, Microsoft buys G5s - interesting" he thought and didn't hesitate to put a short note about it on his weblog.

So far, so trivial, one might think. But a few days later, he again had something to write about from inside Microsoft:

"The day started like any other day — get up, dink around for a bit, bus into work, and start working through the stack of jobs. Just shy of an hour after I got in, my manager came in and asked me to step into his office when I had a chance. Sure, no biggie, and I headed over as soon as I finished the job I was setting up.

"Okay, here's the first question. Is this page," and here he turned his monitor towards me, letting me see my " Even Microsoft wants G5s " post from last Thursday, "hosted on any Microsoft computer? Or is it on your own?"

"It's on mine. Well, it's on a hosted site that I pay for, but no, it's not on anything of Microsoft's."

"Good. That means that as it's your site on your own server, you have the right to say anything you want. Unfortunately, Microsoft has the right to decide that because of what you said, you're no longer welcome on the Microsoft campus."

And that simply, as of about 2pm today, I once again joined the ranks of the unemployed.(...) "

Yes, it's true: this poor soul got fired for reporting the fact that big Microsoft buys a few small Apple computers !? How sick is this ?

Now the whole online world is up in arms. His postings get hundreds of comments and trackbacks. He even got slashdotted and is now officially the new star of the blogosphere !

Through their stupid reaction, Microsoft made sure that a posting, which otherwise would have gone largely unnoticed, is now seen by millions of people form all over the world. That was really clever, wasn't it ?

So, what can we learn from this ? Well, never underestimate the power of the Blog ! ;-)