It has been my experience that the universe tends to operate in highly personalized spiraling cycles. The cycle part, that repeats, seems to be based on who needs what lessons when and how much was actually learned, retained and practiced from the last lesson. The spiral is the tendency to continually to move forward even if external forces attempt to restrain. Marketing, unlike Sales, as a category of customer interface is distant and impersonal. Social media, through “content” and to a lesser extent “context” has tried to overcome both in an attempt to increase corporate revenue. But when stuff goes wrong and customers become frustrated with products and services, they cut the door locks and force their way into the human side of the “customer dissatisfaction” team. That can be downright scary and at the very least is seldom a welcome site. Direct customer interface is not in the marketers playbook…that’s what sales people do. So maybe one solution might be for marketers to lace up their boots and get dirty with the sales team for a while. The only other solution that seems to fit the spiraling cycle would be to minimize the distance and became personal from the get-go.