Like a lot of other folks, we followed the twists and turns in the saga of General Motors Co. and its Adam Opel GmbH unit partly through the blog postings of
John Smith, GM group vice president for Europe and lead negotiator on the planned divestiture. Having noted the unusual phenomenon of Smith's social-media
updates in our own blogs, on Oct. 26 we published a more ambitious story on them by senior writer Lou Whiteman, which The Deal Pipeline subscribers can find
here.
Is this the wave of the future in deal PR? Whiteman's conclusion, based on conversations with GM and several M&A communications pros, was no: GM-Opel is a special, extremely high-profile case.
But as it turns out, we haven't had to wait long for another special case: Cisco Systems Inc.'s (NASDAQ:CSCO) proposed purchase of Norway's Tandberg ASA for about $3 billion. With some shareholders complaining the price is too low, Ned Hooper, Cisco's strategy chief, has written a
blog post explaining why it isn't.
Our friends at Reuters DealZone have also
noticed that Hooper has followed Smith's lead. They too doubt that we're in for a wave of blogging by folks in the thick of negotiating deals.
We're still inclined to agree. And even if others do follow suit, we expect the blogs to continue to be as notable for what they don't say as what they do. Smith has yet to blog on GM's surprising (and in Germany, highly controversial) decision on Tuesday to hang on to Opel. And Hooper, for his part, politely leaves out one of the best defenses of Cisco's price: It's not as if Tandberg didn't shop itself around first. -
Kenneth Klee
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