Steve Rubel wrote a post talking about Jeff Jarvis’s recent troubles with Dell, and how Dell should do everything they can to make Jeff happy since he’s an "A-List" blogger.  For clarification, A-List bloggers are considered the most influential bloggers out there.

Most of the comments left on this post took issue with Steve’s assertion that Dell should spend more time worrying about Jeff than your "average" blogger because he is an A-Lister.  Here’s the text of one such comment:

"An A-lister??!" Comments like that undermine your assertion that
all (or at least most) companies, entities, etc., need to monitor the
blogosphere to help their customer support functions. Why should
companies monitor the blogosphere if it’s just a few of their customers
that deserve private jet tech support??

If you want to draw attention to and live in the world of an elite
group of "A-listers" then you’re not living by the same rules you’re
trying to sell to potential CooperKatz/Micro Persuasion clients. If
markets are conversations, don’t all the voices matter?

Treat some customers better than others because they may or may not
be blog "A-listers?" C’mon, Steve. I’d be embarrassed about this if I
were Jarvis.

To which Steve replied:

Joel, I definitely feel that ALL companies should listen to all
bloggers, but that doesn’t mean they should send out a plane to every
single person who complains. Jarvis having issues with his PC is really
bad – especially since he’s on TV a lot. He’s got a bigger megaphone
than most.

I have to back Steve up on this one.  Egalitarianism in business is NOT a good thing.  All customers are not created equal, and if a business doesn’t realize that then they won’t be in business for long.

There’s a fellow out there named Arthur Hughes who I used to work with many years ago.  He wrote books and articles on database marketing, and he made a compelling case for why companies should not treat all customers the same.  Without going into all the details let me summarize this way:  if you have one customer who spends $1,000 a month with you for five years and another customer who has spent $5 with you once over the same time frame would you treat them the same?  Should you spend the same amount of resources on the second customer as on the first?  If you do you’ll be much less profitable, if not out of business.

By the same token, if you have one customer who’s negative comment will be heard by 10 people or one customer who’s negative comment will be heard by 5,000 people would you treat them the same?  Of course not.  Sure even the least influential blogger has a better chance of being heard outside his own circle of friends and family than any non-blogger, but the reality is that A-List bloggers are guaranteed to be heard by many times more people than your average blogger.  Should you spend the same resources responding to the average complainant than to the A-Lister?  Not if you want to thrive.

Any business should definitely try to insure that all customers get their (fair) complaints resolved as effectively as possible, but when a business gets a complaint from someone with a big megaphone it should throw every resource possible at fixing the problem to minimize the damage to its image.  That’s just smart business.

Of course the bigger challenge these days is figuring out who has the big megaphones…but that’s for another post.