The need to read… and respond

Marianne Richmond has an interesting rant about Sprint and how they handle criticism from bloggers. Here’s an interesting statement:

I disagree that the blog is the “channel created and maintained by someone else” and therefore “they” don’t have any responsibility to respond to it. When the corporate representative, from whatever functional department he/she came from, reads on a blog that the individual writing the blog has a problem they should “deal” with the problem in whatever channel will get it fixed. That’s their responsibility as a responsible corporate citizen at the very least. In a sense, it is similar to the “duty to inform” issue from my clinical licensing exam: you are aware of the problem, now report it to those who can fix it. It is your duty and responsibility.

There are two things I find notable here:

a) companies are regarded as having a responsibility to react to criticism, regardless of whether it occurs “on their turf” (i.e. their blog or website) or elsewhere. The “space metaphor” of one website existing “away” from another is essentially given up – discussions matter, but not “where” they occur

and

b) any corporate employee must cover the full spectrum of communicative functions, regardless of whether his position inside the company qualifies him to represent it or not, or whether or not he was hired for that purpose.

I believe that these kinds of expectations are already common and that they will continue to spread as more and more people become accustomed to the “flat world” environment of social networks, where there are virtually no communicative filters or barriers. Customers increasingly expect companies to act like people, that is, they expect you to prove your trustworthiness and show that you’re interested in what they have to say. They also expect companies to act as people, meaning, to be identifiable by name and face. They want a concrete person on the other end to feel responsible for their issue and act upon it. They obviously do not want to be forced to understand the inner workings of the company – and why should they?Of course, at first this looks outright scary for businesses. Every employee is expected to feel responsible for and involved in customer relations (from the viewpoint of the customer), but if he screws up he instantly represents the entire organization. (And while this may always have been the case, the problem is magnified on-line.)

But I’m not really sure if these things are as bad as they may sound at first. The thing is that right now so many resources are being poured into proactive PR, with companies starting blogs concerned with their dedication to social issues or to refute criticism of their business practices. Why not a little more reactive blog PR? Look what people are saying about you and talk back, on their turf. Have a team of people do that, have them produce answers instead of announcements.

I think that would make quite an impression.