BuzzMachine

Kerry Dupont is diminutive and soft-spoken but she has the guts of a Marine. She has been traveling to Iraq and she’s writing about it on her blog.

We blew a tire on the road, there were so many cars with plates from Mosul on that road and though I am able to say I felt no fear, some of my guides were feeling a bit anxious over me being there. That’s the terrible thing. I can handle causing myself fear, but not being the cause for others. The other thing that was disconcerting was watching the driver every time a rock was sent up from a lorry, and hit the windshield with a crack, he would automatically duck his head as a reflex. That brought home the reality of living in Baghdad for the past years to me. I couldn’t possibly feel as scared as most Iraqis, because I haven’t lived in that climate of fear for that long. But I remember too well the feeling immediately following Sept.11 here. Too many have forgotten it. Yes, we were resolved. But most were always waiting for the next attack, specifically in the first week following. I only wish people could keep that in mind when they are losing patience with Iraq. For them, it is like living in NYC every day as the day after September 11, only the attacks don’t stop, so the fight/flight reflex is always just below the surface. And they’ve been doing it for decades. And people wonder why it’s taking “so long”….

In various reports about my Dell fit, the point is made that this is a larger blog and I got media attention. But the truth is that (1) I didn’t get one bit of help from Dell because of the blog or any media attention but only because I found a VP’s email address and (2) it doesn’t matter how many readers you have but only if you have the right one: that is, if the person in the company you’re talking about is smart enough to care what his or her constituents are saying. Case in point [via Jay Rosen]:

What happens when smaller fries harp online? Does corporate America listen?

Most of the time, probably not, but it’s interesting to watch when a blog post actually catches a company’s attention. That occurred earlier this year, when a North Carolina blogger, Jon Lowder, made a quiet complaint about his hometown paper, the Winston-Salem Journal, and compared it, unfavorably, with a newspaper 30 miles to the east, the Greensboro News & Record.

Part of the post read, “I live in Winston-Salem. I have the Winston-Salem Journal delivered every morning. But I don’t feel like I know anyone there… I get all the N&R blogs via RSS. I don’t get their paper… yet. But I still feel closer to the N&R.”

There are a million and one wistful comments like this on the web, but somehow this one got traction. For one thing, it was quoted by NYU’s Jay Rosen, the author of the PressThink blog, a widely read site.

For another, both the Winston-Salem Journal and the Greensboro News & Record responded to Lowder’s original blog post. Indeed, the News & Record’s top editor posted a brief reply.

More remarkable still, though, was what happened at the Winston-Salem Journal. Not only did the paper respond to the post and supply contact information, but it went and created an RSS feed just days after Lowder’s original post.

Now that’s customer service.

Now read Jon Lowder himself and see how damned impressed he is that he was heard. A thousand people could have read him, a million. But if the guy who could turn the right switch was asleep at it, then it wouldn’t have mattered. But somebody smart, somebody who gave a damn heard Lowder and did something. That is how any smart company should act in this new age. You don’t wait until the volume of complaint is deafening; you don’t have to. Now you can go online and search for what people are saying and then do something about it. You don’t need a megaphone or a press or a broadcast tower. All you need is a conversation.

To him.

I thought Louise Lee was writing about my Dell kerfluffle for Business Week online. Open the magazine today and find it there on page 13 with a mug of uncorrespondent Michael Dell.

There’s a possibility a piece about the saga will be in Media Guardian Monday; will link later.

For BizWeek readers, here are links about the tale.

I just spoke with the PR person at Dell. Running around today, so I’ll blog it later. Nothing earthshattering came of it.

: LATER: Hugh MacLeod on Dell:

The thing is, when you start turning your products into commodities, you start treating your customers like commodities.

More interesting reaction to the who wants to own content post here and here:

Do you see how radical this is? It’s distributive. It’s about a life of intellectual abundance and the death of scarcity. It changes not only how you think, but how you feel. It’s expansive, it grows, it self-corrects. This is the revolution the denizens of the 1960’s only dreamed about.

: See this developing list of examples of “convergence culture.”

: Business 2.0 starts a discussion on how to make money when conversation is the kingdom.

: More here. There’s a discussion going on in French, thanks to Loic, but I can’t join in.

Treonauts — my favorite example of the nano in nanomedia — says it helped inspire MobiTV to port to Treo but then Mobi didn’t invite the blog into its beta. Silly. We Treonauts stick together and you couldn’t get better marketing — and market and product research — than from such an alpha customer.

I’m delighted to see my pals at Rocketboom get a story in Business Week by none other than Heather Green. Andrew Baron and Amanda Congdon are onto something; they’ve been onto it for almost a year now. They’re talking about trying a subscription service and implicit in that is some fear and trepidation of advertising.

Confidential to big advertisers: The first one of you who discovers Rocketboom and sponsors what they’re doing — without trying to change a hair on Amanda’s head — will win the smart-guy-ad-award of 2005. You want to talk to the audience who’s not watching TV? Here they are. You want to associate your brand with something cool? Here it is. You want to tell your public that you share their interests? Here’s your chance.

Clifford May, the head of the Foundation to Defend Democracies — a private charity that got Department of State funding — writes an open letter to Cindy Sheehan.

So let me suggest an alternative: Come visit with me. Our meeting probably won’t get much publicity but I can promise you an interesting discussion. I’ll invite to join us some of the many Iraqi freedom fighters with whom I’ve been working for the past several years – many of them women — as well as democracy and human rights activists from Syria, Iran, Libya, Egypt, Lebanon and other countries.

You say you want to know, “What is the noble cause that my son died for?” They would answer: Your son died fighting a war against an extremist movement intent on destroying free societies and replacing them with racist dictatorships.

The Iraqis will want to tell you what life was like under Saddam Hussein – the mass murders of hundreds of thousands, the women and girls who were gang-raped by Saddam’s cronies, the creative forms of torture that were ignored by the “international community.”

I know several Baghdadi businessmen whom Saddam suspected of disloyalty. He had their right hands amputated. Want to meet them? The doctors who were forced to perform these amputations are worth chatting with as well.

The letter will run as a full-page ad in Waco’s paper.

The FDD also has a blog (full disclosure; a friend and former colleague helped them put it together); it includes ongoing commentary on the Iraqi constitution.

Yes, I, too, am getting sick of the Dell saga. But it is the gift that just keeps giving.

The phone rang during dinner tonight. Dell calling. I thought it might be a tech offering to deal with my son’s machine, since I had complained about it and the Dell PR lady who called yesterday said she’d have someone call (more on that later this weekend). But the odd-sounding guy on the phone just kept asking what I thought of the 600M we’d bought in February. I kept asking why he was asking. He kept asking the same general question. So, finally, I told him: Every time my son runs a game that uses the graphics card, it overheats so badly that I just bought an extra fan to run under the machine to keep it from scalding my kid’s knees.

Well, it turns out, the guy didn’t care. He said he’d pass it on. I asked what was going to happen. He had no answer. Dell didn’t give a damn.

Finally, he admitted that the only reason he was calling was to try to sell me some Dell broadband service.

I said I’m on the do-not-call list and he should not be calling me.

Dell has become worse than a door-to-door salesman. No pride. No shame. No value. No brand.

As I said when all this started: Dell sucks.

I keep concentrating on the media and citizen end of the explosions in content and distribution. But here’s a post from my friend Will Richardson, the educator who understands blogs and citizens media better than any I know, and here’s another from a a librarian looking at the question of who wants to own content from their perspectives.

Says the librarian:

So, one thing this suggests is that the parts of the content industry that have experience with relationships and trust–like libraries–should be in the ascendancy. Are we dismantling the fences and walls and expanding our trust circles? Slowly.

Says Will (my emphasis):

Schools used to own the content they delivered, but no longer. There is better content, in most cases, to be found on the Web than in standard texts. There are richer databases of information, more knowledgable experts, and more diverse sources of uniquely pertinent material that we can draw upon now. And that renders the one-textbook-for-all approach basically irrelevant. While these resources may at first blush appear more unwieldly and complex than those comfortable, traditional texts, we do our students a disservice by not tapping into their diversity and timeliness.

We need to create our own texts, because we can. Our students need to help us, because they can. We need to ask relevant, diverse, living sources to participate, because they can. This is a totally changed world we’re entering, and we need to begin serious conversations at our schools as to what those changes mean and what strategies we can use to take advantage of them.

It helps to analyze the future of media from more perspectives than just the newsstand or the bookstore: like the classroom and the library.

: SEE ALSO: Libraries offering downloads.

At a Fred Wilson/Brad Burnham brown-bag lunch about exploding TV last fall, I argued that the future of TV should be P2P distribution with means to measure audience, attach ads, and verify delivery. Then, when advertisers will again support free TV in a new network nobody owns, P2P will become everybody’s friend. Chris Anderson meets Bittorrent creator Bram Cohen and comes away making the same arguments.

In the continuing Dell discussion, Steve Rubel answers Steve Baker’s question about how companies should deal with lots of bloggers raising lots of customer service issues:

Steve, over time I think you’re going to see blog search and Web search tools integrated into CRM systems. This will give customer service the tools they need to manage individual issues that bubble on blogs. However, you are right. PR professionals will increasingly need to not only serve as an organization’s mouthpiece (one of them at least), but also its eyes and ears. The best PR pros have done this for years. Blogging just makes it easier to keep our finger on the public pulse.
This is how we operate at CooperKatz. We monitor the blogosphere for all of our clients. If we spot a customer issue, we route it to the right party to manage. Occasionally, we also reach out ourselves to begin the dialogue.

Interesting… so imagine if rather than having to go to companies for service — and waiting on hold and waiting and waiting… — the companies came to us! What a concept.

Think of that world-in-reverse: You post a need online, tagged with a microformat (more on that later), and people find you and bid to solve your problem or sell you their product, selling you with price and also with testaments of trust.

That’s not the world in reverse. That’s the world as it should be: The sellers come to the customers, not the other way around. The customers becomes the marketplace. I like that.