Until I write my long overdue “what is branding” post, let’s discuss how a corporate identity is just like everything else in the 21st century: i.e., tied to information, and therefore to communication.

Last May, a young designer named Dustin Curtis sent an open letter to American Airlines via his personal website, by offering a mock-up redesign of their website’s homepage. A couple of days later, he published an unofficial response he received from a American Airlines employee (Mr X), along with some of his own comments. Then, an hour after he posted the response, American Airlines fired Mr X.

(First off, it needs to be strongly stated that Mr X should not have used his company email account to disclose company private information. Full stop. If he doesn’t get that, he has no idea what work ethics or a contract are, and more generally he doesn’t understand how the Internet works. Not good for a designer… When an employee uses company property to breach their contract and asks to stay anonymous, they sound like they’re begging to be fired.)

But back to Dustin Curtis, and his nice bold move which got him so much attention. As Mr X replied, “simply doing a home page redesign is a piece of cake”, which Joshua Blankenship eloquently explains: “it’s easy to “design” when you’re unencumbered by things like metrics, creative direction, business acumen, sales experience, actual functionality, enterprise scale, or any thought about how a site with millions of page views and users has to function.” But let’s not be too hard on Curtis: he’s a young designer who wants to be noticed, and he managed to get more than he hoped for. By “young”, I believe like Carlos Pero that Dustin Curtis may simply be not experienced enough to understand the big picture large companies have to deal with.

But the important point here is not whether American Airlines’ homepage should be redesigned or not.

What matters in this story is that the buzz generated by Curtis is the indicator of a new business world that he understands because it is natural for his “generation”: the world where PR, marketing, CRM, sales, and branding, are all interconnected, and get rooted online.

There are already a lot of Curtises out there, and there will be more and more of them as time goes. Businesses better get used to it.

So, the cliché goes like this: in the days before the Net, everyone could climb on a soapbox and gather crowds, but it would take a while before they get a solid audience to listen to them, and most didn’t. Nowadays, it is even easier to set up the soapbox, and reach a larger audience hungry for more pop-corn content. It doesn’t matter if what the millions people on soapboxes say is true, it doesn’t matter if they even understand what they’re talking about, and it doesn’t matter how smug they are, because they will damage your brand, and it will cost you more if control of the situation escapes you.

Personally, I believe in the “there is no such thing as bad publicity” attitude, but you need to know how to handle such situations. And in this case it would have been so easy to get the same amount of publicity — or more! — from the good kind, if American Airlines had followed a few simple rules, such as (but not limited to):

(a) cultivating a good corporate culture where employees can communicate and get listened to, so that they don’t want to talk to strangers about internal dirty laundry,

(b) learning to listen and paying attention to what people say about you online, so that it is the proper PR representative who responds constructively to Curtis, instead of a designer,

(c) communicating, often, always, before designers send you open letters, and especially before your disgruntled employees (who shouldn’t be disgruntled in the first place) reply to them, and

(d) preparing for crises, and being ready to put out fires before they get out of control, with a friendly smile.

This list is by no mean comprehensive, and I don’t claim to cover all aspects of PR and marketing in this humble post, but you get the jist: the worst that can happen to a company nowadays is to be described as being “run by executives who aren’t concerned about customer experience“. It’s not enough to be big or loud anymore, you have to communicate, and that includes listening, and replying.

Better yet, modern companies who understand the value of this conversation, encourage participation and involvement from their audience, their customers, and even their detractors. Think “how am I driving?” stickers, anonymous suggestion boxes in lobbies, etc. If you encourage and facilitate good and bad comments, and pay attention to it, you will build a reputation of trust and transparency, which can go a long way, as illustrated by Google’s famous “don’t be evil” corporate motto.

But more importantly, you will benefit by learning much more than with expensive focus groups, AND you will be able to reply, address and explain issues, help, and educate your audience, before someone else does.

Because the issue is not that people say things about you, but to understand that this conversation has become an integral part of your brand. People will talk, not only the media, and not only about public issues. So your business is now to listen, and transform the opinions into constructive feedback.

In conclusion, if American Airlines want to terminate Mr X because he breached his contract, they should do what they see fit, according to their business rules. But if they don’t want this internal issue to hurt their business, they should prevent the backlash by addressing it before it creates a (badmouthing) buzz.