Customer Interaction … To a Fault?
Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Blog.
“On today’s Internet…amateurism, rather than expertise, is celebrated, even revered....The professional is being replaced by the amateur, the lexicographer by the layperson, the Harvard professor by the unschooled populace.”
This, in case you’re wondering, is a bad thing, according to Andrew Keen’s new book “The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing Our Culture” (Doubleday/Currency). And yes, most of it is just as apocalyptic as its subtitle indicates.
Keen, a former digital media entrepreneur, has emerged as one of the go-to guys for criticism of Web 2.0, which he rather famously called in a piece for The Weekly Standard a “grand utopian movement” similar to “Communist society.”
Okay, so he can be a bit grandiose. But one needn’t be a card-carrying Luddite to be given at least a moment’s pause by the implications of an “all free, all the time” society when it comes to the question of copyrighted materials – and you’re not an anti-democracy wingnut if you feel that just because everyone’s entitled to an opinion, that doesn’t mean they need to give it on everything.
Professional debate, Keen says, is one thing, but the Cult of the Amateur means that anyone with a PC and an axe to grind can come off as an informed, important voice these days. To take the point to an obvious – if still amusing – extreme, one Amazon reviewer posted that, following Keen’s premise, “This book review on Amazon, written by someone who is not a ‘trained professional’ reviewer, has no right even to exist.”
There’s power, and then there’s too much power. We’re all familiar with the scenario wherein someone spends untold amounts of time and money inventing, streamlining, or at least tweaking a particular product or service, just to have someone else come along and blog (or, maybe even more worryingly, post on the company’s own website) a scathing review of the new/improved item in question.
It’s possible, of course, that they’re right. But if you’re in possession of reams of market research, testimonials and other data that say otherwise, what recourse do you have?
“The Cult of the Amateur” came up more than once at last week’s annual conference of the American Society of Business Publication Editors in New York. During one panel discussion, attendees were posed with a question: if your company’s website or blog is being consistently bombarded by a particular user for what he feels is a sub-par product – to the extent that he seems to be inhibiting or even harassing other users – should you ban him from your site?
Where does your company draw the line – if at all? Is the power of the PC becoming an absolute – and, if so, does it really matter?
Feel free to share your ideas and experiences; we promise we won’t ban you from our site.
