Here’s something every corporation and government agency needs to keep in mind, in a in a quote from blogger Seth Godin:
“Your lawyers are in your marketing department…Unfortunately, when they interact with the public or with a partner or even a landlord, they are marketing your organization, whether they want to or not.”
Here’s the perfect illustration. A 10-year-old girl who just loves her iPod sends a fan letter to Apple Computer CEO Steve Jobs suggesting ways he could improve the device. Did she get a nice form letter in return? Not exactly.
Instead of a response from Mr. Jobs, she received a form letter from Apple’s law department informing her that the company does not accept unsolicited ideas, and also told her not to send any more suggestions. Apple’s Web site explains the company policy, and also offers a Web page with links to feedback forms.
Shea’s mom commented “We were stunned, we just were stunned, is the best word to say. It just wasn’t the appropriate type letter to send to a third grader who had the initiative to write to them.”
Other reports indicate that the harshly worded reply sent the poor girl crying to her bedroom. Thus, the natural headlines came out: “Apple Computer makes 10-year-old girl cry.” Not very smart.
Good idea, bad execution
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I agree Dom. In my last company, I tried to communicate to everyone in the company that EVERYTHING is business development. Every email can have a positive or negative affect. How you deliver a report tells clients how profressional you are. The quality of your product is reflected in the quality of everything you do, no matter how small or insignificant.
Apple (Steve Jobs) has always had a reputation of great product, but was never really considered a people place. Maybe that “personality” trickled down.
Jobs is evil e-v-i-l, for he has expanded and perpetuatued the use of poorly compressed audio in his AAC format. For that Dante’s 4th level awaits him.
Jobs responded nicely to my 22 page letter explaining the long (months of) history of how when they gave me a “new” replacement computer for the one that did not work right out of the box, they somehow failed to tell me that they took the RAM from the original new and broken computer and put it in the “new” replacement computer which not surprisingly was having the exact same problem as the first broken computer that customer service kept blaming me for. My new “new” computer has been working fine for years now. I’m sorry I thought this was the apple care protection plan blog.
Nice result in the Maine case: the suit was withdrawn today.