Mitch Joel writes an interesting post Does A Social Media Vigilante Mean Equal Customer Service Justice For All? where he talks about social media vigilantes who name names in trying to build their own brand and obtain some form of resolution, retribution and/or compensation for poor service.

Mitch takes a different path and chooses to use his base to educate through highlighting issues, not companies and the fact patterns, responses and implications of the responses as opportunities for learning. By not creating sensationalist headlines that leverage brand names, Mitch highlights issues which becomes a positive force for change in an engaged way. Screaming at companies “Hey look at me and my crowd” while demanding things is not an easy way to win friends and influence results at a company. Most companies see the result as setting a precedent for others to follow and feel they are “damned if they do and damned if they don’t.”

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The headline in the New York Times on Urban Baby’s site redo says “Don’t mess with mom’s chat”. It seems that most of the changes they made left the hardcore devotees furious so they organized a boycott of the site (seems the boycott was not wildly successful). The main complaint and mistake seems to be that the changes appear to have been done with no input from the audience.

Question: What review was done? With whom? How? On the Urban Baby site it says that they posted messages “on the site front door and in newsletters”. Just goes to show how many of the devoted read these. So if a tree falls in the woods… will anyone hear it? In a community environment, not only do they hear it, they find a way to broadcast it - especially if they were not a part of the process.

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I am a pretty heavy Firefox user with tons of add-ons that really are pretty awesome. DemoGirl turned me on to Flock it looks very very cool.

I am pretty confident that it is quickly going to be something that will be a major part of my web experience. Hope it lives up to the expectations. Seems like a great way to do what some of my plug-ins facilitate in a pretty intuitive way. Drag and drop inserts for blogging, clipping, all email accounts in one place, photo uploading, connections in one place for all my social networks accounts, feeds, and a whole lot more. Can’t wait to try it.

If you have experience with it/recommendations, please pass them along.

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