This Tom Reynolds vs Telstra story I broke last week is just getting funnier by the moment. Mark Jones reports that Tom’s blog has been completely pulled down off of Telstra’s "Now We Are Talking" blog. Even more interesting is that I can’t find a copy of it on Google’s cache! What’s up with that? Mark says you should all buy a copy of the Australian Financial Review tomorrow because he’s written an article on the whole deal which contains lots of quotes from Tom and Rod Bruem, Telstra’s spokesman, who still denies Tom’s dismissal had nothing to do with his blog, even though Tom says his blogging was specifically mentioned when he was informed, by an external employment agent, that Telstra didn’t want him back in the building, effective immediately.
So, as if Telstra’s NWAT experiment hadn’t already lost a heap of credibility (and it didn’t have a lot to start with) through this exercise, taking down Tom’s blog altogether, hiding the evidence, as it were, just lowers them another notch in my book.
Now I don’t know Rod but I have met Paul Crisp, one of the Public Affairs guys at Telstra involved in the NWAT experiment and he’s a smart guy. Paul – why pull down the blog? Obviously we haven’t heard Telstra’s side of the story yet, apart from short dismissives which I am struggling to believe, but I think you would have been better off handling this a different way.
And what did you guys do to the Google cache????