This is excerpted from Scott Welch’s answer to When will Quora be removing our names from the comments they created based on the question details we edited before deprecated in August 2017? The comments should have been authored by a Quora bot, not by innocent users. I want this post to focus not on BadHombreBot-Gate (Viola Yee’s term for the spurious attribution of erstwhile Question Details), but the corporate communications aspect:
This has already been fixed; this was a mistake and we’re very sorry. Migrated question details are no longer attributed to users and are not visible in user profile edit logs.
Quora has now responded to this question. I’m going to list the elements that would constitute a professional communication piece. I’ve lifted them from my initial response above. I invite you to see how Quora did.
- The information should be communicated clearly (that means including full details of what happened and a commitment to chance the process which lead to the problem)
- effectively (that means using a combination of media to reach all users)
- and promptly (that means being proactive, not reactive)
- by Product Management (that means a real human with a real name)
- in close cooperation with MarCom (that means reading like it was written by somebody who actually cares)
- and with full support from the C-suite (that means a quote from at least one C-suite denizen, taking responsibility)
By my calculation, Quora scored zero out six.
Discussion on whether this is a reasonable expectation or not is welcome.