In this day and age where information leaks abound, you can be certain that most things that should be for a company’s internal use will “somehow” find its way onto the Internet.  While blog and web postings on future product developments, product releases, price cuts, etc. may generate positive buzz and interest from the online community, there is a dark side to this as well.

Recently, there have been two “for internal use only” sales/promotional videos that have leaked onto the web.  The first is one for Microsoft Vista SP1 and the second was for Mercedes-Benz.  The Microsoft Vista internal promo, complete with a faux Bruce Springsteen and a recreation of the “Dancing in the Dark” music video with a Courtney Cox lookalike, has been soundly ridiculed by all the major technology blogs from Engadget to Gizmodo as well as major news outlets like the Wall Street Journal and CNET.  Microsoft initially tried to spin it as a gag and a parody, but it’s clear that the company made a real financial investment to produce this video and intended to use it to rally the sales troops.

More recently, a Mercedes-Benz promotional video intended to boost sales morale has been circulating on the Internet.  The tone of this video, featuring a Bon Jovi wannabe (sidenote: what is this fixation on New Jersey bands by big corporations?), is far more juvenile in nature with such trash talking lines as “Gone is the Bimmer, and to Audi say ‘bye bye.’“  However, the most damaging lines occur around the 2:15 minute mark of the video where Fake Bon Jovi sings “At Volvo they worry, the Japs they just cry.”  Considering that Japan and the Far East market constitutes over 10% of Mercedes Benz’s sales, allowing the use of a racially derogatory term in an internal promotional video was not the wisest of choices.  Luckily for Mercedes-Benz, it appears their damage control team worked quickly as the video has now been pulled from YouTube.

The lessons learned from these internal video leaks are threefold.  First, regardless of how honest or law-abiding your employees are, always assume that confidential information will escape.  Very few companies are “airtight.”  According to a recent study by Xerox, 80% of enterprise information attacks/leaks are by insiders.  In addition, with the availability of cheap bandwidth and wide reach many blogs and file sharing sites have, the speed at which the leaks proliferate is stunning.  Second, make sure your firm has a diversity/cultural sensitivity team that reviews and approves all content and media prior to greater distribution.  We can look back and laugh at naming faux pas like the Chevy Nova (roughly meaning “does not go” in Spanish), but in today’s high speed digital age, these oversights can spread like wildfire and generate a mountain of negative publicity.  Third, have a damage control process in place to constantly monitor the chatter on the Internet to ensure that if embarrassing information has been leaked to the Internet, you are able to address it quickly.

In a perfect world, everyone would be law abiding, globally aware, and culturally sophisticated.  However, we live in a place that is far from perfect and as such, companies must be equipped to prevent, minimize and mitigate the effects of internal information leaks.  If companies do not plan for these eventualities, they will be on the receiving end of more buzz than they could hope for – of the negative kind.