Reaching out to your audience - Cafe USA in Korea

The US Embassy in S-Korea launched the first-ever online community about a week ago and has since been flooded with messages - messages that are not necessarily to their liking, apparently a lot of blatantly profane postings, some of which were deleted by a Web site manager.

Statements such as the following were posted:

"President Roh Moo-hyun should be removed from the presidency as he is set to ignore the ruling of the Constitutional Court against his plan to move the administrative capital out of Seoul" or "Down with the U.S. government’’ for its unilateral approach in international affairs."

The US top convey is of course not happy about the way the messaging goes - they would prefer some positive posting.

This reminds us of the controversy between Real Network and IPod users a couple of months ago - Real thought that everybody was on their side when they launched a tool that allowed their subscribers to get the songs from Real's network onto their IPod. Next, they opened a forum and closed it after they too were inundated by negative criticism.

This is real time feedback - what can we say? If you open up to the public, you shouldn't expect only positive feedback. There are people out there that don't like you. Live with it, communicate to them, converse with them and learn about their views. Not everybody likes the way the US is conducting themselves, just like not everybody liked the way Real Networks "battled" IPod.

(By Asia Business Consulting)