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It truly is mind-boggling there aren't more companies doing that. Having even one employee dedicated to answering questions for an hour when a thread pops up in a remotely popular place is so beneficial:

- It is directly helpful to users and casts a good light on your company

- It makes the company look more human and composed of actual people, rather than automatons (think Google)

- It provides a way to clear up potential PR disasters, misunderstandings etc when the eventual user comes up with whatever conspiracy theory is en vogue that day (there's always one)



The reason more companies don't do that is liability. Saying the wrong thing is 10x worse than saying nothing at all.


You would definitely have to make sure that the person a) has a clue and b) is, in fact authorized to make binding commitments.

Sending out a "politician" type who specializes in speaking at length while saying nothing is worse than not doing anything, IMO.

(edited to add that I think Stripe handles this extremely well... they could be a model for others)


There are spokepersons and PR people...




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