In fact, the aforementioned service, gothere.sg, has had examplary open communication with its users via Twitter. People who have problems with the service or criticize it, receive responses inquiring about the status of the problems, so that there can be further investigations to improve the service.

Likewise, this morning I was pleasantly surprised to receive a comment on my blog, from the founder of Statuzer, a Twitter/SNS client, on the post I wrote last night, in which I did point out the shortcomings of their product. The comment surprised me because:

1. Statuzer responded so quickly – great media monitoring habits?
2. Statuzer’s founder humbly said that he’ll work on improvements, and invited me to contact him should I have any further feedback.

This wasn’t the first time that he’d taken the initiative to contact me – prior to this, he did contact me when I Tweeted that I was having problems with installation of Statuzer (eventually I realized it was AdobeAIR’s problem, and not the Statuzer client that was at fault).

Coming back to the problem at hand, Victor Tan of vic.sg wrote that Tweet.sg never did care about its reputation, as it had no intention of monetizing it. In fact, as Victor pointed out, Tweet.sg has been recommending other similar services to Tweet.sg users who were disatisfied with its service.

While I do agree that people have the option to leave a free service if they are unhappy with the admins, developers, or the service itself, and that not everyone is cut out to be customer-oriented or have a pleasant disposition, in the end the question is really about how successfully we can dissociate a PR disaster from the rest of our life.

As someone who has made errors prior in reputation management, I’d say that it’s completely impossible. Till this day, I still have people sending me hatemail about the Ping.sg saga of a year ago. While I decline to further comment on that issue, I do feel that I’ve learnt a lot in the year past. That ink stain will probably be a permanent mark on my life’s canvas, but a worse situation would be if one never learns.