The TSA blog v. the Palm blog

I came across the TSA blog (glamorously named “evolution of Security”) the other day (via). It is surprisingly, surprising to me at least, a fairly interesting blog. It’s young - started at the very end of January, but it’s got several posts already.

A lot of the first posts were simply about security points that they knew people had problems with, for example shoes, liquids, nail clippers and inconsistency. Not surprisingly, people poured out in droves to vent their anger, frustration as well as reasoned arguments about why these things just aren’t making us more secure. Many of the posts have hundreds of replies.

What I find so remarkable about the site, though, is the way it is handling this outpouring. They are clearly not backing down on anything - they’re all for all their policies, we saw that before on Schneier’s interview with Kip Hawley. They are instead seeing what people are saying and calmly responding to many of the broad threads - sometimes updating the post, sometimes creating a new one. They’ve written in depth replies, I saw a post where they recorded a few experts responding to common questions and posted them up as streaming .wmv’s.

I honestly don’t know if the site will work, if it will sway public opinion on these topics - perhaps it will. I think this handles things particularly well:

In the spirit of transparency, we plan to note how many comments we’ve rejected and tell you why. Mostly the rejected comments include profane language, political rants or abusive posts that we just can’t print, and some are completely off topic. Other than these, every post will go up as written and we will continue to operate this way.

Thanks again for the great range of insightful, sad, humorous, outrageous comments. Keep them coming and we’ll do our best to try to keep up.

This is the way you make a PR blog. In my mind, strangely enough, it was immediately contrasted with the Palm blog. As corporate blogs go, this started off awful and then moved to just sorta crappy - providing no PR or advocacy but mostly it’s become a press release repository. Here’s the thing, the TSA’s audience was always going to be people who hated and wanted to hate the TSA - yet they calmly and rationally handle everything replying with reasoned (or at least reasonable sounding) answers. Maybe change some people’s minds.

The Palm Blog, otoh is populated by people who are frustrated by Palm, yes, but at the same time want to love Palm. They are looking for something, anything, to hold on to. A sign that Palm is doing something other than sitting on its thumbs. Instead Palm posts their press releases and when there’re problems quietly ignores them. You can see in the first days of the blog hundreds of comments would pour in - all largely ignored - as Palm posted about missed dates, updates that didn’t work, etc… No problems were directly addressed although sometimes they’d be obliquely posted about in a tiny followup post. Now, Palm posts things that no one cares about and each receives a handful of comments.

It’s possible, even likely, that there are interesting things going on at Palm, what with the Centro performing well and Elevation Partners hopefully active in getting things in order (although unfortunately they insist on keeping Colligan on board). But you just wouldn’t know it. There’s zero transparency and zero discussion with their audience on the blog.

It would have been so easy for Palm to bring some of their confused audience back into the fold with a real dialogue and straight talk - TSA style. Sadly, that’s not how they are handling it. I hope they turn it around - maybe they can take a cue from the TSA blog and jump start their blog again. Despite it all I have a soft spot in my heart for Palm (unlike the cold, calloused, raging spot I have for the TSA) and would like to see them back in the game.

Feb 6th, 2008 · Comments RSS · · · · · Tags: blogs · palm · travel