Talk about a meaningful turn of events.

In the summer of 2005, Jeff Jarvis of Buzz Machine began the now famous Dell Hell thread; where he relentlessly (tho deservingly) attacked Dell for its then abominable approach to customer service.

Cut.

A year-and-a-half later, on its Direct 2 Dell blog - Dell offered these words to their customers:

We are making efforts to be more forthcoming. We entered the blogosphere in part to take on negative issues. Will we make more mistakes along the way? Sure, but we are listening and learning as we go. In fact, the blog is all about those conversations, and it's why I'm recognizing this debate that goes on about and around us.

David Henderson of Making News expresses this concern in response to the same question I asked him and her: that when a major PR firm decides their client is better off flogging - er, fake blogging - chances are, the state of the firm's media relations is verging on piss poor (my words, not his).

His exact words follow:

I think we need to be cautious of turning meaningful marketing terms, like Mindshare, into the latest PR pop-hype.

...So says Kami Watson Huyse of Commmunications Overtones. She also recently cracked on Edelman and Microsoft for their handling of laptop-gate, concluding: I wonder if there will be as visible coverage of the Vista operating system as there was about the evaluation computers?

So, I decided to pose the same question to her: how do you think Edelman's PR stunt with Microsoft affected the quality of Edelman's mindshare online? And here's what she had to say:

Your question and some comments on my post about the Microsoft gift, got me to wondering how media companies, whose business it is to review items, handle this situation. I turned to the guidelines set forth by C|Net, one of the best-known tech review companies.