This was a phrase which really struck me this morning from Obama’s acceptance speech. There were so many beautiful, eloquent phrases in the speech, it felt like a reboot button for the world has been pressed and I amongst many others I know have been very moved by listening to the speech. 

The thing which struck me about this phrase the most is that it’s a great maxim for so many occasions; some personal and some professional. Most pertinently for anyone thinking about involving their brand in social media it has to be at least one of your governing principles. 

Why would you engage with an audience only wanting to hear good things or neutral things. If you want to build better products, deliver better services, build a long term sustainable business you have to listen to the bad things. Furthermore, talk to the people who bring them to your attention either about fixing them or explain why things are the way they are. 

I’ve been following a really interesting example of this of late involving someone I’ve admired for years: Tim O’Reilly. Tim recently endorsed Barack Obama. I’m sure I wasn’t alone by not being surprised about this. I was however surprised when it created a small storm of protest where some people were saying it was inappropriate for a technology publisher to be publishing on political issues.

First and foremost, I can’t see why this is the case. Technology and issues are deeply intertwined, both in causing and helping issues. Energy consumption of idle server farms and devices on standby, complex financial instruments which can only be algorithmically traded, suppression by governmental surveillance are all places where there needs to be political thought leadership accompanied by a tech industry thought leadership. This is one reason why for the longest time I’ve read Tim’s blog. Furthermore O’Reilly as a publisher has always had an interest in where technology and life meet; politics is merely a part of this interface.

The wonderful part of this “issue” for me was to see Tim’s response. He wasn’t hiding from the issue, he was listening to the people who disagreed and he was stating why he felt justified to doing it. He also made public that he was changing the one thing which he felt was wrong. They called the area of the site it was highlighted in “news” which they were renaming to “news and commentary”.

“My conversation with fleab started on this blog. I recognized the issue he raised with the link to it on oreilly.com.

At the time I wrote my second response, I didn’t realize that it was categorized as news. Last night, I did notice that, and asked the folks running the site to rename the category News and Opinion.

Guess what: most of the other stuff that appears there isn’t news either; it’s opinion. Not sure why an opinion about the possible importance of some technology didn’t raise ire about its past miscategorization as news, but in any event, we’ve renamed the category News and Commentary.

So this was in fact a good general catch about the labeling of that particular widget on the main oreilly.com site, because most of the blogs featured there are in fact commentary rather than news per se.”

For me this was a great example of how a “brand” can engage with an audience who feel they’ve been wronged or slighted, no matter whether you felt the audience or the brand was in the right. 

One commenter on Tim’s response made a point which I’m not sure I agree with at all

“Plain and simple Tim, I think it’s fine to endorse a canditate, but you will lose business. You comment back and you’ll lose more”

I think this is true if Tim had been rude or disrespectful, he hadn’t been either of those. He may have been firm or forthright, but he had listened and he had also shown that he’d listened by engaging. I personally think by commenting back he may have shown those who disagree with his political views that he is human and these were personal comments, not those of his imprint and most of all, he is listening.