John Quinton-Barber:
Look who's talking

Nowadays, with new technologies at our disposal, no product, service or developer for that matter, is immune from electronic assault, whether that be from blogesphere, Facebook or a petition on the Number 10 website. But how well prepared are we?

Dell Computers were certainly not prepared for their 'Dell Hell'. You may recall that an ordinary citizen, the guy behind the blog buzzmachine.com, was responsible for almost bringing the Dell empire crashing to its knees. And it all began by him recounting his then recent experience of poor customer service from Dell, in an entry entitled, "Dell lies. Dell sucks".

What followed must be the best example of why you shouldn't ignore Internet chatter. Hundreds of disgruntled Dell customers began to link their own blogs to the 'Dell lies. Dell sucks' entry and discussed their own Dell customer care experiences. And despite being offered the chance to respond and interact with the bloggers, Dell stayed quiet.

A decision to stay quiet and faceless, crippled Dell - their market share and share price in the US shrank. The media got wind, ran with the story and the blogger behind it all has become something of a legend.

Dell now openly admit that they got it wrong and totally misread how bloggers, social networking sites and everything else associated with what is now known as Web 2.0 need to be dealt with in the same way as you would any journalist or inquisitive politician.

Interact.

Bloggers aside, the sudden popularity of standalone sites like Facebook, Myspace and Bebo, while not yet merited for consideration in planning determinations, are excellent tools for anti-campaigners to quickly spread a message to thousands of 'friends' and signpost them to an official anti-campaign website - where you can download a petition or standard letter to object with.

Check out some of Facebook's frontrunners: 'No to demolishing Camden Market' - 25,000 members; 'Save Chippy Lane' (Cardiff) - 8,000 members; 'No to congestion charging in Manchester' - 2,000 members.

Admittedly, most people signed up to these groups are not activists, but given their age and demographic profile, the potential to object now comes from a whole new and previously disengaged generation.

So what does this mean for developers, who are often on the receiving end of criticism from a local community?

Well, social networking aside, nobody can quite work out how many bloggers exist in the UK, but if we accept the Internet industry's claim that there are over 30 million bloggers worldwide, and 100,000 new blogs started each day, you can bet that if someone isn't talking about your development proposals yet, they soon will be. And you had better have a plan.

John Quinton-Barber is a senior consultant at Manchester-based IPB Communications