When Wells Fargo started it's Guided by History blog several months back, I was ambivalent. I had the feeling they were trying to show that their roots in San Francisco went back a long way. Since then, the blog has had evolved a good deal and most recently, it seems to me, it has gotten very, very interesting.
The blog is now focused on disaster preparedness and that makes sense for a huge company that holds mountains of paper in mortgages and business loans. They are enmeshed into most local communities in North America and then all the components are networked into the Wells fargo infrastructure.
I learned a little more this week during a couple of consulting sessions with a few of their people, this week, but it is their current coverage of the currently raging Southern California high desert fire that has grabbed my attention because it is new and different from anything else I have seen.
The bank is using its local staff to provide feet-on-the-ground coverage of a complex catastrophe as it unfolds. In one recent post, the Wells Fargo interviews a customer who's hands get scorched as she opens a barn in a desperate attempt to save her livestock. She succeeds in letting the animals make a run for it, but loses the barn.
We know about traditional media coverage, which does a good job of providing spectacular photos and recording what official spokespeople have to say. Everyone is also familiar with the coincidental and collective power of citizen journalists, who just happen to be present when a bomb goes off in a London tube or when a hole gets bunched out of an Alaska Airlines plane in flight.
But Guided by History is different. This is a Fortune 500 company with a network in communities all over the place. They are using staff as correspondents or stringers with access and knowledge of their local communities. Trad media does not have the human and data resources that they have. Citizen Journalists, by their very nature, cannot be organized in so many communities the way Wells Fargo is.
This seems to me to be both interesting and important. I have no idea just where it is going, but I think it has very significant implications and is well worth watching.
