Speak Softly and Carry a Big Stick

We've all heard Teddy Roosevelt's famous line about speaking softly while carrying a big stick. The point is that you can have considerable influence without being belligerent when people well know that you are powerful.

Interesting experience yesterday brought that quote to mind... it seems that in the social media age, bloggers carry big sticks. Even if they are new, rarely read ones like this one. I discovered this much to my surprise when I published a couple of posts about Jive Clearspace that were not complimentary about the product.

Well, all hell broke loose! And I thought no one was reading this blog! Jive is, I can assure you, and by the morning after the posts went up it was clear that I had Jive's attention.

Now I didn't think I was carrying a big stick. Maybe a pea shooter at best. I was just frustrated at the pace of progress on some issues with Clearspace and expressed that frustration. I certainly didn't expect to be contacted with an offer to speak to the CEO if I wished, but that's exactly what happened.

We have a good relationship with Jive, and they have been cooperative and responsive. They just haven't been able to fix all the issues we have raised, yet (I say "yet" hopefully, wishing all will be fixed in the end). And yesterday I spoke on the phone with top level guys at Jive who gave me better answers than I had previously received.

So what have I learned from all of this?

1. Jive is one of the companies that "gets" social media and is scanning the blogosphere to see what people are saying about it.
2. Jive not only scans, they act promptly to respond to and repair damage to their reputation before it spins out of control (see a long list of companies that failed to do this in the past, including Dell, AOL, Comcast).
3. Even blogs with little traffic constitute a "big stick" when it comes to companies that pay attention to their social media reputation.
4. Don't settle for unsatisfactory answers from a vendor until you have escalated the issues as high as possible. It turned out that although I thought I had pushed the issues as far as they could go, it was possible to push still harder and get better answers.
5. Be careful what you post in a blog, as you may throw someone under the bus without realizing it. Apologies to my sales contact at Jive, who had the house fall on him after my posts circulated within Jive.
   

In the spirit of cultivating our ongoing relationship with Jive, I voluntarily withdrew the posts that caused such a ruckus. No one made me do that. The reason I wrote them simply went away. If down the road the issues still aren't resolved or if the answers I was given yesterday should turn out to be untrue, I may choose to post an addendum to this account, detailing what went wrong.

But before I get to that point, I'll call my contacts at Jive directly and push them as far as I can, speaking softly and giving them a chance to make things right. It's pretty cool to have a big stick :-)