About
the Author
Michelle Patterson is excited
with the new technologies that are threatening to change the way we stay in
touch and communicate, particular in business. She works with companies that
are introducing these technologies to make understanding them easy for regular
people.
Since the dawn of man,
people have been communicating. That's no secret to anyone. It's only gotten
faster, better and easier since the days of tin cans and string. First came the
lowly phone, which begat Voice Over Internet Protocol, which begat Unified
Communications and Video Conferencing. Now add to that Instant Messaging and
all the other ways we have of talking with each other. And add in all the other
ways that I have yet to mention — social media, for example, or haven't thought
of until just this moment. The multitude of one-off chat clients, for example.
This brooks the question —
how much is too much? Or rather, how many ways are too many ways? How do we
choose the best way of reaching the person we want to reach, and at what point
do we sit back in our chairs, baffled by the sheer number of choices?
Is it possible to have too
many ways of reaching a single person? At what point do we give up and say
"Forget it, I'm just sending them an email. If they get it, they get it,
if they don't, they don't."
That's just some food for
thought in this rapidly moving technological age.
Now think of this situation
in a different way. Think of a service provider. Of course, as part of their
excellent marketing strategy, they'll want to monitor all their communications,
and all the things being said about them so they'll have a chance to respond to
them. They'll want to be seen as proactive, at best; they certainly won't want
to be seen as not responsive to their customers.
Yet with the all the methods
of communication
that I brought up above, it's now become quite easy for a small team — even
just one person — to levy an amount of pressure on that service provider that
would be easy to term "unholy."
Imagine you work for the
marketing department of this service provider, and you see emails coming in
from this person — one an hour. Messages, once every ten minutes. Calls several
times a day. Twitter messages at all hours. They malign your service, they
accuse you of things you didn't do, he's got some bone to pick, an axe to
grind, and you don't even know why.
Now imagine your service
provider is an SMB. Now it's easy to see how this one person can cause the
collapse of your enterprise — not only do you spend too much time managing the
negative spin created by this guy, but you spend a lot of time answering his
queries as opposed to actually doing your real jobs.
So how can an SMB manage
this potential threat? Is there a process that can be adapted to deal with this
madness?
Of course it's easy to block
or ignore messages, post rebuttals or disclaimers, but as soon as you do that
against one username, another will pop up. It's not terribly useful to play
whack-a-mole with people in cyberspace, as it's so easy to create and use
different identities for the same person.
You could employ your own
talent. Quite often even things did digitally leave invisible footprints. A
skilled hacker can find these footprints and backtrack them to discover who
posted them, from where, and when — but then what would you do with that
information when you have it? So far as I know, it's not technically illegal to
harass a company, but it would be to send a hit squad against those harassing
you. So there would be some questionable legality involved.
Or perhaps there would be
some automated process that you could set up on your own servers — it could
look for your company's name juxtaposed with any number of unfavorable words,
and then send those messages, UC-style, to a "questionable" bin.
That might do the trick.
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