Follow-up Measurement About Google Searching for Confidential Do Not Distribute
As communicators, every day we try to keep up on the latest ways to break through the clutter, get attention, and inspire action. To assess how well we do that, we measure our results. So, we looked at the results of one of our recent posts Know HR Notes: Don’t put confidential information on the Internet. The post provided our readers with the statistics about how many highly confidential documents were easily available on the Internet and about how easy it was to find them. Similar posts were propagated throughout the Internet by many blogs. In the search that led to the original post, Google found 60,300 results for the phrase “confidential do not distribute“.

I repeated the search for “confidential do not distribute” today. Apparently, more than 50,000 internet-users actually acted. Infinitely better than generating interest, substantially more important than getting attention, readers were motivated to change their behavior. That’s the ultimate reward for a communicator — action — it is what we work for every time we put pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard).

Today, I found only 9,590 results. Most of the top results linked to blogs that talked about the phenomenon. I also searched a number of variations on the original search terms, including: secret, top secret, “do not distribute“, “for internal use only“, confidential, embargoed, and several others. While trusty Google found results for each, I found only a couple that appeared actually to have been inadvertantly released. Ironically, they were instructions on how to edit the website for MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning and the answers for the cscc40 Analysis and Design of Information Systems mid-term exam at the University of Toronto. Anecdotally, with those two notable exceptions, it appears that companies, the government, organizations and individuals got it. Confidential (or secret, personal, private, or whatever you want to call them) documents need to be protected through technical solutions or they should be kept off the Internet.

Interpreting Results
In science, accidental findings are often as important as the ones you are seeking. What we can conclude from this review is that the Internet, and more specifically blogs, are media that can’t be ignored. They’re a community of computer-users that have discovered and exploited a new medium for sharing information and their opinions. Though some are, many bloggers are not experts on any specific topic, on computers, or on communicating. They are exercising their writing muscles and hoping to connect with other people who have common interests. In many ways, like clubs and organizations, it’s a tool to make the world smaller. To subdivide it into parts where people come together and share their interests. Communities that are no longer limited by geography.

We recognize that on the Internet, where thousands of people posted about this issue, we certainly can’t claim that we are responsible for any specific results. If one company changed because someone read the post on our KnowHR blog, I will consider that success. But, we’ll probably never know. Even though we knew we could never be certain whether if it was our post or another that led to specific changes, we measured the results anyway. What the results reinforced was something many people strongly suspect. The blogging community is powerful. As a whole it can and did make a difference. The power of the blogging community likely can’t be fully harnessed nor directed. It includes is a wide diversity of opinions. Bloggers critically examine what they pass on and they must be convinced in order to support or repost something else they’ve read. However, the community can be influenced and used to great effect. Use of this medium is simple. Anyone can have a blog. Anyone can use a blog. Use of the community is much more difficult. It generally requires the truth ‚Äì backed by evidence.

There’s More to Do
Beyond that, I will postulate that more than likely it was the IT folks that reacted to this threat. Evidence shows that those who are members of the generation that are leading many large companies do not use the Internet as much as younger generations do. And even less frequently do they write or even read blogs. This is a wake-up call to the c-suite. If you are not yet an active blog reader, ask your IT group… or ask your kids. Get someone to set up an RSS reader for you. Regardless of how you do it, start reading blogs. The information comes fast and furious. You might even find out things about your own company that you didn’t know.

A Related Note
On a related point, one reader questioned the utility of labeling documents “confidential” given the risk that it may make those documents targets for nosy Internet-users There is no doubt, that practice did lead to the disclosure of a number of corporate secrets. However, it also tells employees what to do with those documents. When they can share them and when they can’t. With the appropriate policies and safeguards in place, document labeling is still another important communication tool. I believe we need to consider how existing practices could be exploited on the Internet and where we can use the Internet to improve processes. In my opinion, we should consider whether it is necessary to stop using a communication convention that folks are familiar with or whether we should create a system to make it safe.

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