Last week I wrote about the Motrin Mom fiasco, and then spent a fair bit of time thinking about the best way for a company to respond to the backlash that can so quickly emerge in the blogosphere (My favorite idea was a “You think you have a headache? You should see what we’ve had to deal with over the last week…” video response). Then at 2:24 on Friday afternoon I received an email from a reader that stated he’d seen Ryan Holiday’s post about me about a few days ago, and nicely indicated that he found it really rude and quite off-base (before sharing a really neat story I hope to write about this week).

After reaching for a Motrin myself, I decided to check out what he was talking about. The article he was referring to was this one- The Worst Thing About Blogs. In the post, Ryan lumped my recent story about Starbucks’ wikinomics-enabled marketing success story with other posts from the likes of Guy Kawaski, Hugh Macleod, Steve Rubel, and Michael Arrington, with the lead-in sentence of (The Worst Thing About Blogs) is that they never let reality get in the way of a good post. Ryan then concluded his post with the following:

If we can deduce anything from the blogs above, it also makes you 1) Sound like an idiot 2) Act like an asshole 3) Always get it wrong

So it’s fair to say he wasn’t a fan of the post. As I read through the comments (some in support of his POV, others defending the posts including my own), Ryan again highlighted my post as particularly egregious, and for good measure pointed out again that it sucked. The reason he gave is that we don’t live in a vacuum – I can’t / shouldn’t be writing about only the Starbucks marketing story when there is another huge thing going on (Starbucks’ recent report of a 97% drop in profits).

So at that point, I had to decide what to do. In turn, I thought I’d share my thought process, and what came of it, since it might be helpful for other people and companies dealing with similar situations. You can see my first comment on his post (last I checked it was 4th from the bottom).

1. Decide whether to engage or not. The blogosphere, and particularly the comment sections, is notorious for maliciousness. As a general rule, if a writer starts dropping insults like “idiot” and the aforementioned a-bomb, I tend to prefer to just stay away. But this seemed like a special case. Ryan seemed like a fairly intelligent person, who’s job appears to be in relation to PR and social media, so I was intrigued by not only the message he chose to send, but how he chose to send it. And whether I liked it or not, based on the volume of comments it seemed like a fair number of people were reading it – so there could be direct benefit from engaging in the conversation.

2. Timeliness versus “Coolheadedness”. As another general rule, I tend to prefer to “sleep on” such issues, in order to avoid a hasty response that I might later regret. However, in this situation I was also dealing with a timeliness issue – popular blog posts can fade away quite quickly, and as I mentioned it was already Friday afternoon. I knew I had neither the time nor inclination to look at this on the weekend, and a Monday response might be a little too late, so I opted for an immediate response. Always dangerous.

3. Cede the point versus defend myself. All of us make mistakes. When faced with a criticism, it is of course important to decide whether you think the complaint is valid and cede the point, or instead defend your POV – noting that sometimes you can do a little of both and find some common ground. In this case, I felt Ryan was quite off base, and decided to actively defend my POV.

4. Choose the tone of the response. When someone is directly saying you sound like an idiot and act like an asshole, it is quite easy to fall into the trap of responding in a similar manner (hence, my “sleep on it” rule of thumb). I wanted to ensure my tone was different – a little more thoughtful and respectful. However, I did start my response with “As the idiotic a-hole who wrote the blog post on wikinomics, I thought I should respond to your criticisms”, so I didn’t fully succeed on this front. But if you read the rest of my comment, I think you’ll find it fair, reasonable, and respectful.

5. Respond directly to the criticism. In this case, I re-articulated what I understood his exact complaint to be, and responded directly to that. This helps to keep the response directly on-topic, instead of meandering into a variety of other tangential subjects, and helps make sure there is a common understanding of the “topic” both people can refer to. In other words, if I misunderstood, my misunderstanding would be clear and he could respond in kind.

6. Demonstrate knowledge in the area (if applicable). In this case it was fairly easy – in a former life I worked for one of Starbucks’ prime competitors in Canada (Second Cup), know a lot about their strategy and business model, and can talk at length about them on demand. I felt that briefly demonstrating I had this knowledge helped set-up my argument for why I chose not to share it in this particular situation.

7. Ask the critic to back himself up. In this case, it was again easy. Ryan was making a direct complaint about what others wrote in their blogs, on his blog. In turn, I asked a simple question – “if you scan through you last 20 blog posts, do you believe they stand up to the bar you have set for others here? Does each one represent high-level thinking, and provide full perspective on all the issues at play?” You can tell from the question what I think the answer is, but the bigger point is that a well phrased question, on-topic, can be valuable to the response. If Ryan can’t defend his POV by using his own posts, he’s clearly got another issue to deal with here.

8. Get a peer review. This one is self-explanatory, and is particularly valuable if you pass on the “sleep on it” option. However, in this case I didn’t go through a peer review process.

I think that covers most of it. So how did it work out? Well, it’s hard to say. After I posted my response the comments section on his post was basically dead, but I can’t necessarily claim responsibility for that – the post was now several days old, and we were heading into the weekend. But it is perhaps notable that of the two comments that followed, one was from a person admitting they didn’t understand most of the blogs he referenced, and the other (perhaps picking up on my question) indicated Ryan’s post should be added to the list of posts Ryan was complaining about.

Ryan himself didn’t respond to my comment on his blog. He did, however, send me an email. This message was notable on several fronts. Perhaps most importantly, there was an absence of inflammatory terms, which either indicates a subtle shift in his thinking, or that it’s more difficult to say such things to someone directly than when referring to someone you’ve never met on a blog. He also re-affirmed being a fan of the book itself.

Ryan also generally stuck to his POV, and re-articulated it in a slightly different / better way. Notable inclusions were that my post was kind of like enthusiastically writing about Nero playing the lyre while fires raged in Rome, and that my not acknowledging the strategic decay of the company within my Starbucks story was almost negligent.

In my mind, this puts us in a much better space. I’m fine with relatively cordial disagreements and differing POVs, and even noted in my response to Ryan that based on what I can piece together about his story Don might be interested in talking to him (think Wikinomics meets Grown Up Digital). However, my POV has not changed, and to sum up this now exceedingly long post I will share three points I made as to why I felt it was not important to put the other strategic issues in perspective in my piece. If you disagree, feel free to share below – but please keep the swearing to a minimum .

The first is an issue we have to deal with regularly in our research. Often times the best examples on the “bleeding edge” of innovation are being done by companies (start-ups and old alike) that have fundamental and fatal flaws in other respects. Some of our best research comes when the rest of the world is focusing on how Rome is burning, but we manage to find a “Nero playing the lyre” that not only other companies can learn from, but they might otherwise not hear about (because everyone is focused on the fire). The challenge for the reader is then to triangulate that information with everything else they know about the situation to draw their own conclusions.

Second, it’s important to remember the context in which a particular piece is being presented. We have heard complaints from readers if/when we stray off-topic on our site – the brand “wikinomics” indicates what type of information they expect. When we write about particular companies, it is perspective on the “wikinomics” part of their strategy and initiatives that people want to hear about. If they want to read about the other aspects of (for example) Starbucks, there are literally hundreds upon hundreds of stories covering 97% drop in profits and associated issues in Google News. If I search for Starbucks Lexicon, there are three hits, and none of them are on topic. It is by telling that wikinomics-related story few others are talking about that we create value for readers and keep them coming back.

Finally, space constraints are an important consideration. The piece I wrote was a little over 300 words. When you write short pieces, as I’m sure you well know the blogosphere demands, it is generally crucial to maintain a laser focus on a fairly narrow topic – every word giving context or providing background is a word that’s not being used to describe the issue at hand. Not everything is supposed to, or can, present the “big picture”… or it would be like boiling the ocean every time you want to make a pot of spaghetti.

As I discussed in my last post, I’m intrigued about the idea of exploring how customers engage with brands on Facebook. I’ve started compiling some data with the hope of coming up with some interesting metrics. While there are still a lot of details to iron out, I thought I’d toss up a few ideas that I’ve had so far in order to see if the wikinomics community might be able to help. The four I’ve looked at so far are: An engagement index comparing fan to group activity, a Facebook group love/hate index, relative fan activity, and relative group activity. The first is kind of confusing, but the other three are pretty straight forward.

1. An engagement index comparing fan to group activity. The idea here is that becoming a fan of a particular brand is fundamentally different than becoming part of a group that associates with it. What’s particularly interesting here is that while groups are generally created by customers (i.e. totally outside of the company control), fan pages are increasingly “facilitated” by the company itself. While this isn’t always the case, and I still have to sort out exactly which ones are, I decided to explore how the fans and groups associated with particular brands might behave differently.

The figure above is a 2 x 2 I developed based on two metrics. The horizontal axis is the ratio of fans to members of the most popular group. In 25 of the 27 cases, the number of fans exceeds the number of people in the most popular group. The contrast in ratios is startling though – Wal-Mart is the lowest at 0.1, and Levi’s is the highest at 127. The vertical axis is what I call an average activity index – the ratio of wall posts per fan to wall posts per group member. In every single case, the per-person activity in the most popular group exceeds the activity on the fan page. The range is again quite high though – from 0.3% (the NBA) to 67.4% (Victoria’s Secret).

Now a lot more analysis needs to go into this to figure out what it all means – it’s not easy to say exactly what is “good” and what is “bad”, for example, and I’ve had to make a few judgment calls that will need to be handled a little more rigorously for the final analysis. But I think there’s some promise here – even just starting from the relative positions of Victoria’s Secret, Starbucks, Wal-Mart, and Levi’s, for example.

2. A Facebook Love / Hate Index. Here things are a little easier to understand. I’ve started going through the groups that have been created around various brands, and putting them in one of four buckets – love, hate, neutral, and employee (noting that the love/hate balance within the employee focused ones appears interesting to explore). Looking at it from a brand perspective, the love/ hate ratio seemed like it could be interesting. I’ve looked at a handful of brands so far, and the current ratios range from about 1.1 : 1 (Wal-Mart) to a startling 67.3: 1 (Disney). McDonald’s is down near Wal-Mart territory (1.5 : 1), and Starbucks is up in the 18.4: 1 range. Looks like it could be a simple, powerful metric to track.

3. Relative Fan Activity. Another easy one to understand: Wall posts per fan as an indicator of engagement levels. From the sample of brands i’ve looked at so far, the range is from 0.0013 (MTV) to 0.0526 (Avon Products). Others near the top are NASCAR, Molson, Bath & Body Works, Peet’s Coffee & Tea, and the NHL. Others near the bottom are The Gap, Levi’s, Nike, Sephora, and Abercrombie & Fitch.

4. Relative Group Activity. Very similar to #3 – wall posts per group member (in the most popular group associated with the brand) as an indicator of engagment levels. As noted earlier, the relative activity in the groups is greater than on the fan pages. The range from the sample I’ve looked at so far is from 0.0144 (Nike) to 3.67 (NBA). Others near the top are NASCAR, NHL, Crate & Barrel, and Avon Products. Others near the bottom are Victoria’s Secret, Somersby, Levi’s, and Abercrombie & Fitch.

Just from the process of writing this, I see another 2 x 2 in my future – relative group activity versus relative fan activity. But before I go there, I’m interested in hearing what people think. What looks promising? What might I be missing? Is there another lens that I could be taking? Any thoughts on #1 would be particularly appreciated…