In theory, publicly demonstrating your concern and attention to criticism will create publicly happy customers and observers who will influence others to positively engage you. But influence is about is also about trust and more specifically the other person’s willingness to trust you. Trust is only established with equal parts of competence and character as agued by Linda Hill in the Harvard Business Review.

Arguably, honest, open and proactive communications with your audience through social media dialogue is an effective way to demonstrate your company’s character but how does it demonstrate competency? How does filling the airwaves with images of your apologetic mea culpa establish your business’ competency? 

Since 1776, when Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations, economists have been espousing the competitive advantages of “scale”, referencing to the almost guaranteed generation of revenue that enterprises enjoy when their sheer size provides a figurative barrier to a competitor’s innovation and price competitiveness.

Will “scale” remain a continuing business advantage where the barrier of entry is blocked by big business’ established and costly IT infrastructure and market reach? Where your competitors need huge cash reserves and many years to reverse engineer your success?

Or do you believe the social era’s new dynamics of fast, fluid and flexible will offset the prowess of scale?

How big is too big for a social network before it loses its value to the community?  Clearly investors and maybe even advertisers will argue that it can never be too big. Certainly the valuation of social media behemoth: Facebook supports this argument. But wasn’t that what was said of MySpace before Facebook? At some point a network becomes too big to provide a valuable customer experience, thus setting itself up for other smaller networks to step in and glamour members into switching?