Friday night, my wife comes home from work with a fantastic tale that was flowing along the gossip lines where she works. Supposedly, a woman had helped some man in a store, and he was so grateful to her that, two hours later when she left and was getting into her car, that same man approached her, thanked her again for all the help she gave him, then said he wanted to return the favor to her and warn her not to go to the mall on Saturday. The woman was really scared by this, and called security from her cell phone while driving home to report the incident.

My first comment to my wife was how curious it would be that someone would wait around at a very crowded mall waiting for someone to leave at a time when they weren't expected to be leaving, and be able to follow that person back to their car, with all those people around, and deliver that message. Sounded like a hoax to me. It even read like a hoax when I received three emails later in the evening, all with a similar tale, but of course with details changed. Me being me, I did a search of all the local news websites, and watched the evening news, just to see if anything was being said; nothing.

Next morning, my wife tells me that there was a news conference locally, saying that this was actually an old internet hoax that began in December 2001 in England, and was finally making its appearance locally. None of the incidences reported had happened, but the police had received a lot of phone calls from scared shoppers because they had just caught wind of the story.

Talk about getting the message out! In the space of 24 hours, most of the community of central New York had heard this fantastic tale, and many of them believed it. Sometimes the more fantastic a story is, the better it moves. Many years ago, I'd lost a lot of weight in a relatively short period of time, and the word spread that I might have Aids, though no one knew where I could have gotten it from. The grapevine can be amazing, can't it?

No matter what you do in business, whether you run your own business, or whether you're a manager or director of some type, you want to be the one controlling your message, not leaving it up to someone else, positive or negative. You want the public to think of your business in the way you want it; you want your employees to hear about news of the company from you, not from outside sources. Sure, you want to listen to everything, so you can figure out what to do if necessary, but controlling how people see you or view you should be one of your top priorities.

The message I want to control right now is to with everyone a very happy and safe holiday season, and I hope we get to visit with each other again real soon.