Partly to submit feedback and partly to see if they were listening to the online conversation about them, I posted an open letter to Yogi Tea on July 11 (Dear Yogi Tea). I allowed six days for the company to jump at the opportunity to engage with me, a loyal customer with a simple suggestion for the company to refresh the Yogi Tea experience. Basically, it was open customer feedback and the chance to turn a loyal customer into a brand ambassador. That post became the number two return in a Google search of “Yogi Tea” within a few days of my post — second only to YogiTea.com.

I heard nothing.

So, I decided to contact Yogi Tea on their terms. I submitted feedback on their site, pointing out my post and suggesting that I’d be happy to speak with them about social marketing as a way to increase notice of their product. I received a personal (vs. automated) acknowledgement of receipt from customer service within four minutes. Wow! I took that as a good sign that someone would be contacting me quickly to tell me if my idea was viable or not.

One day went by. Then two. The days kept passing, eventually becoming a week.

It’s been nearly two weeks since my note to customer service; nearly three since my open letter and product suggestion to Yogi Tea. Still nothing.

I probably shouldn’t care. I do. Why? Like many people who are changing the way they consume products and interact with the companies that make them, I care because I have been a loyal customer and wish to remain so. Spending money on a company’s product is no longer enough in this age of engagement. I want to feel like the companies that I patronize see me as more than a sale and statistic. I want them to know that I care about my purchase and consumption experience. Similarly, I want to know that they appreciate my business and feedback.

In many ways it’s entirely selfish of me to expect a company to follow up with me. In many other ways it’s good customer relations and relatively affordable to be engaged with your target market, especially those that are already consuming your product and reaching out to you to expand that experience. That kind of engagement can turn existing customers into brand ambassadors which can result in new customers.

At the same time as Yogi Tea appears to not be listening and has missed an opportunity to engage with an existing customer, other tea manufacturers such as Numi Tea and Choice Organic Teas seem similarly disconnected from the online conversation about their competitors.

While there are a few standouts in every market, many products and services are becoming homogenous. To be remarkable in this world, you need to be more than just the purveyor of a quality product or service with a slick marketing campaign. You need to be a connector in your market.

In its heyday in the 1960’s, NASA invested in two key areas of the space program: the technology and the people. The premise of this spending decision was that NASA couldn’t get to the moon without the tools to get there (and of course, the people who knew how to use those tools) and the excitement and support of the public. The latter led to astronauts being sent to charm school. They learned how to dress, be social and communicate with the public. The astronauts understood NASA’s operating goals so they could communicate them in their own words, with their own passion and the values of the organization. Public relations junkets became the norm for the months and years following each mission during which the astronauts were expected to speak on behalf of the organization. Despite its operational and public-relations problems, NASA has been around and intact for forty-nine years.

When I started my career in the mid-1990’s, management sold the staff on our importance by sending us to technology and customer service ‘boot camps’ — five day courses compressed into two because we were ‘the elite’ and being away from our desks cost money. We were expected to memorize and recite, verbatim, the mission statement of the company. Whether or not we believed in the mission statement and whether or not it was anything more than a string of platitudes was inconsequential so long as we could regurgitate it to anyone that asked about the company. If the person with whom we were speaking started to ask additional questions about the company, we were expected to defer up the chain of command and if anyone from the press approached us, even reciting the mission statement was considered a no-no. That company lasted a little more than two years before being bought for a song, converted into a few business units each of which was sold off and ultimately dissolved less than five years after the original company had started.

I continue to see examples of the corporate communications trends of the 1990’s in the new millennium.

As the world of technology and communication has evolved, it would seem that the world of management and marketing has generally devolved. Companies are investing heavily to develop and deliver the same old top-down message to a more critical public using newer and sexier technology. They should be investing in all of their people — sending them to Web 2.0 charm school for customer service courses, public speaking workshops and writing classes.

Web 2.0 is a culture, not a technology. If you embrace the culture throughout your organization, your people and technology will help you build a strong community of real-life and online relationships central to your brand.