'Yours Is a Very Bad Hotel' includes some priceless pages. Among them are several "Quotations From Night Clerk Mike," the Faustian villain ("I have nothing to apologize to you for," he says at one point), as well as "The Career Path of Night Clerk Mike" (who may be happy now, but he'll apparently be a septic-tank cleaner by 2014). Also worth a gander are pages exploring the definition of the word "guarantee" (as in, "guaranteed reservation") and whether the authors will ever use Doubletree again (it seems the chances of winning the U.K. Lottery -- 1 in 13,983,816 -- are better).

DoubleTree apologized and revised its employee-training system; parent Hilton Hotels donated $1,000 to charity on Farmer and Atchison's behalf. An overwhelmed Farmer is denying interview requests. But in the e-mail that came with the PowerPoint file, he admits, modestly: "We think we've made our point."

And we've just made it worse for DoubleTree by sending this article to everyone on our mailing list, although we applaud the company for dealing with the situation so competently.

Unfortunately, the much-beleaguered Enron isn't quite so clueful. Last week, The New York Times reported that the company recently fired at least two employees for posting information or negative opinions about it on Internet message boards, one of whom was the person who revealed in early December that Enron had paid $55 million in retention bonuses to top managers and executives just before it filed for bankruptcy protection and laid off 4,000 workers on December 2. The other one made the mistake of using company computers to spout off on Yahoo!, which made his actions easy to trace.

Of course, anything Enron does should be considered with an entire shaker of salt's worth of skepticism. A scorched-earth policy banning all employee participation in Internet message forums will backfire. More importantly, it's become critical for companies to communicate directly with customers online, especially when it comes to providing detailed product information and countering negative opinions that contain factual errors or easily-solved problems.

Should Enron have ignored the postings? Probably. Every company has its malcontents, and pointing the spotlight on their complaints simply makes them stand out amidst the clutter. Heavy-handed efforts to stifle legitimate grievances will cause the dissenters to use anonymizer software and tactics to cloak their true identities.

But the best approach is to encourage other employees to post positive comments about a company without fear of reprisal. Hiding a corporation's challenges from being exposed on the Internet is a fool's errand on par with draining the ocean with a spoon. Remember, once you've opened a can of worms, you always need a bigger can to put them back.

Does your organization (or clients) have a crisis communications plan in place for coping with online nightmares, or even day-to-day occurrences? The DoubleTree case history is a good example of how to handle a disaster after the damage has been done. It's time to get serious about developing a strategy that's flexible enough to allow for employees to represent the company without squelching their First Amendment rights to free speech.

Mainsail Interactive Services can help. We offer a comprehensive suite of products to help companies track what's being said about them in real time on the Internet. And we can also provide the "what if?" framework and relevant case histories to guide the development of internal standards and processes for online communications.

For more information, please contact Mainsail president Mark White at mwhite@mainsail.com or 510-647-1500.

Based in Brussels, Chris Clark is senior vice president of strategic services for Mainsail. He is also the author of "Byte Back," a monthly humor column for Adweek Magazines' Technology Marketing.

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