Dell has given Jeff Jarvis a grudging apology following his one man campaign about their service levels. "Obviously, Mr. Jarvis' experience could've been handled better," Dell said. (D'ya think ?) Undoubtedly, this will go down as another blogopshere scalp, but there are some serious lessons to be learnt from the episode...
As Jarvis points out, the main event here is that Dell has changed it policy towards bloggers. The problem is that is has done so under duress (not a good a look) as a result of Jarvis' open letter to Michael Dell, which became the third-most-linked-to post in the blogosphere last week. (Dell's use of corporate speak - such as its intentions to 'outreach' to Jarvis - didn't help either.)
Clearly, Jarvis is a very well-know blogger with a considerable profile that allows him to be easily heard. However, as I mentioned earlier this week, the blog monitoring services I run for my clients show that there are hundreds of mini-Jarvis' out there airing their frustrations about large organisations. And while it may take longer, undoubtedly some of them will be heard, probably with the help of mainstream media - for which the blogopshere is such rich hunting round.
But it needn't be like this! By taking an Ouside-In approach, companies can start viewing the blogopshere as a public forum that offers a rich source of information about their customers and marketplace - rather than letting frustrations bubble up and create more complex problems.
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