In business as in life, reputation matters. So do intentions and appearances.
A little over a week ago, my friend CV Harquail took Wal-Mart to task for allegedly knocking off Girl Scout cookies:
Wal-mart has fake Girl Scout cookies in ‘beta’ distribution, on their way to a national rollout. Because the cookies are ‘reasonable facsimiles’ of the authentic Girl Scout cookies (I sampled them myself at BlogHer ‘09 last week) and are being sold at an everyday low price, these cookies are poised to snatch cookie sales right out of the hands of the Girl Scouts themselves.
The post set off a firestorm in the comments and in the national media and blogs, prompting responses from FoxNews and Wal-Mart itself. Harquail received praise and criticism on her blog, which she deftly parlayed into an opportunity to address the modern corporation's role in the social media conversation:
What I do know is that no one from Wal-mart has actively participated in a two-way, interactive conversation with me and/or (from what I can tell) with other people writing about the story.
That’s disappointing, because if Wal-mart did join the conversation, in a public and transparent way, we would feel like Wal-mart was learning. And, we would be more willing to reconsider our assessment of who Wal-mart is and is trying to be as an organization.
Today, Bob Sutton, author of The No A**hole Rule, weighed in on "Thin-Minty Gate":
My experience with Wal-Mart is that these are good people who mean well, they are extremely competent, but sometimes are blinded by their culture -- this appears to be a case where they suffered from a severe knowing-doing gap that could have been averted by simply asking a few objective outsiders to react to what they were doing. But asking others for honest feedback and listening to them is something that we human-beings often fail to do, despite the best of intentions.
As tempests and teapots go, this is a pretty frothy one. To Harquail's point, I don't think anyone knows what goes on behind the closed doors of Bentonville, Arkansas. To Sutton's point, greater exposure and need for community engagement requires a finer attentiveness to public perception. I rarely assume bad intentions on the part of any organization until I receive evidence to the contrary, but Wal-Mart bears a greater burden than most in managing its image. One would hope that all parties find a way to take something positive from Thin-Minty Gate.
Comments