A consumer advocacy group has taken to the blogosphere to fight ComEd's controversial rate hike.
The Citizen's Utility Board's blog links to newspaper articles, reports consumer horror stories, and publishes in-house studies attacking ComEd's rate hike, which went into effect in January and has resulted in bills that run anywhere from 25 percent to 300 percent higher.
ComEd's rates were frozen for 10 years by the Illinois General Assembly. Now, the higher rates are necessary to maintain the company's economic future, ComEd argues.
A debate is raging in Springfield over how to control the sudden, sharp increases.
CUB's blog has joined that debate, providing a platform for Illinois residents to express their outrage at what they perceive as price gouging to line the pockets of ComEd shareholders.
"New media is such a great way to get your message out there," said J.J. Babb, communications coordinator for CUB. "They are important ways to reach out to the younger generation."
The group's blog is part of a growing trend of smaller organizations and even private individuals who want to cast light on the activities of larger corporations, according to Clarke Caywood, a public relations professor at Northwestern University.
"For large corporations, they have many years of experience," he said. "Small organizations often have no other channel."
ComEd Care, a Web site ComEd hosts to educate consumers on creative ways to save energy while presenting ComEd in a positive light, serves to counter some of the negativity of bad publicity.
Such tactics are not foreign to other Chicago-area businesses. McDonald's, based in Oak Brook, experienced some of the first poor Web publicity on the Internet via an anti-McDonald's site seeking to cast the company in a negative light.
McSpotlight.org seeks to educate consumers on the impact that the international fast-food chain has on the environment, nutrition and even global capitalism.
In turn, McDonald's launched a corporate blog in 2006 titled "Open for Discussion," through which the firm's VP, Bob Langert, hopes to encourage more transparency within the corporation.
ComEd's response, on the other hand, is much more typical of large corporations. Less than 6 percent of Fortune 500 companies host a public blog, according to a report by eMarketer, a New York research company. And what's more, less than 14 percent of Internet users even read blogs, the report said.
