One lesson to take away, please

I've been in this situation before: Questioning a Web site that makes investment claims that can't be true, then being blamed for disrupting a test. The purported investment company in that case actually named me by name as the villain in their consent decree with the Securities and Exchange Commission. By the time the SEC got done shutting them down, a principle that most of us now take for granted had been established: publication of an investment offer on the Web is publication, and you can't claim the right to a do-over merely because current technology makes it possible to do so.

The take-away from the exchange below? Language matters, and organizations assume immense risk going live without adequate forethought.

For those of us in the communications field, the recession isn't ending; it seems merely to be beginning. Anecdotal evidence I'm collecting from colleagues, and certainly from my own job-hunting experience, is that us word guys are still being cut. "They seem to assume the public will just figure out what they're talking about," a colleague who has lost several clients in recent weeks told me yesterday.

The effort it takes to thoroughly edit a Web site doesn't seem steep considering the verbal discovery process that happens in editing could keep someone in the public's esteem, and maybe even out of jail.