I have been following this story over at Nashville is Talking, A Play-By-Play: The JL Kirk & Associates Saga with an interest in the community aspect of blogs and what I perceive to be a wide gap in understanding of the power that personal (or volunteer) journalism is having in the world of consumer/public relations.
There was a time when the art of complaining about products and services involved writing/typing/mailing letters to the company involved and perhaps sending a copy to the Better Business Bureau. When there were real issues and real problems, the facts (free of emotional baggage) often resulted in some sort of compromise agreement where everyone walked away happier or with a better understanding of what transpired. The time between the problem and the ultimate resolution frequently allowed all parties involved to remove highly charged, emotion-driven feelings, and simply work toward a "cooled-off" solution. There was an old PR axiom that says that if a customer is happy he'll tell a friend or two. If he's angry, he'll tell 10 or 20.." Let's just start by saying that Ward and June Cleaver are no longer with us to resolve issues in this manner. The landscape and the technology have changed the math of the old axiom.
Electronic response times to issues and crises can be nearly instantaneous. A car salesman could hear about a problem car from a cell phone as the customer rolls out of the show room. Email is ubiquitous and speedy. Those one-to-one devices pale in comparison to the dynamics of electronic communities (list-servs, mass email, and discussion boards). If you take the power of one-to-one technologies and blend it with the technologies of electronic communities, the result is a one-to-many dynamic that has the potential to disseminate information on a viral/exponential scale. Bloggers, particularly communities of bloggers (even Twitter users), can elevate the level of exposure to an issue from something personal to something that is (literally) global in the same amount of time that Alexander Graham Bell said the words, "Mr. Watson--come here--I want to see you." Thousands of words, images, and attachments can be spread with the click of an "enter" key....and reactions to those electronic elements can be published as fast as a responder can type into a blog comment box.
So the clash of an a company who resorted to the delivery of a certified letter (snail mail) and a customer who is well versed in the art of electronic communications will make a ripple across the news in the next few days. There has been damage done to the customer. There has been damage done to the company. There may even be damage to the reputaion of the law firm that finds itself in the middle of the two. Undoubtedly, there will be a new perspective on the community aspects of blogging that will emerge from this that will either enhance the reputation of bloggers and the social-activist power of these communities or there will be consequences that will damage the reputations of the bloggers and this new media technology.
There have been other cases where an individual's online presence clashed with a company. I see this as much more than that. This is a generational-technology-gap clash where technology will be on trial almost as much as the facts coming from the conflicting parties. We shall see.
If you are interested in the power that Google search has on this particular case, you might start by analyzing the impact of Bob Krumm's Post, "Kirked". Here is a snippet:
"You’re only going to draw more attention to a report that certainly sounds like a scam, a fraud, a rip-off, or a con. Because the next time that someone googles J. L. Kirk & Associates, or Kirk Associates, or JL Kirk, or JLK, or JLK-A, or sometimes just “Kirk“, they can’t help but be directed to Katherine Coble’s commentary about how she and her husband felt like they were almost caught in a scam, a fraud, a rip-off, or a con."