The power of us

I was listening today to a November episode of Across the Sound (I believe it was episode #9), a podcast about PR, marketing and media done by Joseph Jaffe and Steve Rubel (who has recently left the podcast and is being replaced by Steve Hall, editor of Adrants). This particular episode's theme was 'the power of us", or how citizen journalists, through the use of blogs can get their voice heard.

One example of this that they use is with Jeff Jarvis, a former newspaper editor who blogs at BuzzMachine. Last summer, Jarvis encountered poor customer service from Dell and blogged about it. Because Jarvis' blog is so widely read, this had a ripple effect that affected the PC buying decisions of many many people.

Fast forward to this past week, when Jeremy Hermanns blogged about an incident on Alaska Airlines where the cabin pressure dropped due to a hole in the fuselage at 30,000 feet. His blog entry garnered a lot of viewers with hundreds of people commenting. This no doubt portrays Alaska Airlines in a negative light, which could affect people's decisions when it comes to buying plane tickets.

These are both fairly classic stories of how citizen journalism can have a widespread impact on businesses. However, I see a bit of an imbalance in this model, a bit of unfairness. Sure, if a business or product has certain faults that affect its customers, I think that customers have a right to know about it, or the right to read other people's opinions. But don't a lot of products have glitches that aren't getting blogged about, or are getting blogged about but which aren't being seen by thousands of people? The power of citizen journalism is certainly an uneven landscape. By some unfair chance, any business could be the subject of citizen journalism in a negative light by a blogger who happens to be prolific. Your competitors could have the same hiccups as you, but aren't subject to the negative reaction of readers.

What is a business to do when this happens? When a) a customer gets dissatisfied by something that is completely out of your control, and cannot be remedied or b) when your business handles so much volume, that it is inevitable that a certain percentage of your customers are unhappy. And it's true that an article written by someone griping about a product gets more attention than say, a blog about someone who loves their new plasma screen TV. Well, from what I've been reading, the consensus seems to be to try to address the issue head on, and try to make things that were wrong, right in order to try to restore faith within the blogging community. However, those things aren't always reparable - Jarvis seems to have dealt a serious blow to Dell's image, an image that may take time to restore even after they have addressed the issues that Javis ranted about. And is Compaq and IBM's customer service any better? Someone, please tell me if you know the answer to that.

Yes, it's an unfair blog world. This reminds me, I was supposed to get a new ipod over a year ago from Apple because my old one was malfunctioning, but they never called me back to come into the store to pick it up. Maybe I should give them a ring...