Twitter is taking some heat this week for its alleged mishandling of accusations by Ariel Waldman that she was being stalked and harassed on Twitter, and that the popular site “refuses to uphold its terms of service.” (You can read the details of Ariel’s situation on her blog.)

According to the blog post, Ariel had an ongoing “dialogue” with Twitter dating back to 2007 concerning her allegations of inappropriate conduct by another Twitter user. She says “in 2008 it (the harassment) escalated to a level that could no longer be ignored,” and on March 14, she contacted Twitter asking for a resolution. She did not get a reply for three days, and she did not find it satisfactory. In later correspondence on April 9, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey told Ariel:

“Ariel,

Apologies for the delay here. We’ve reviewed the matter and decided it’s not in our best interest to get involved. We’ve tasked our lawyers with a full review and update of our TOS.

Thank you for your patience and understanding and good luck with resolving the problem.

Best,
Jack.”

Ariel also posted her experience on Get Satisfaction, a site that enables consumers/users to engage directly with company representatives when they feel they have received bad customer service, or that a company has broken a promise, or violated an agreement.

Some questions pop up right away. What could Twitter have done better in its early conversations with Ariel to keep this situation from becoming a public embarrassment? Whether Twitter “bungled” this situation is unclear, but it is equally unclear that they handled it correctly.

Jack’s email above is dismissive. He offers no explanation for the decision. His recognition that Ariel is upset with this matter, and that he sympathizes, is less than superficial. Obviously he was advised by his lawyers to say very little. Had he had good communications counsel, he could have balanced the legal advice with some openness and authenticity, which would have been a very Web 2.0 thing to do. Instead, he comes across like a tobacco company CEO.

Bad communications counsel, or no communications counsel at all, will eventually lead to mistakes that will damage a company’s reputation. Most of these mistakes are avoidable, unless you’re too arrogant or too cool to seek professional advice. A public relations professional would have told Twitter’s executive management:

• Consider every negative customer interaction as an opportunity to build trust and rapport with your customers
• Be prepared that every bit of correspondence of any nature will become a matter of public record. Conduct yourself in all dealings as if you are writing for public consumption, and your communications will be more thoughtful and more strategic. (And they’ll make you look better when they are reproduced on a blog or on the front page of the morning paper.)
• Investigate allegations quickly, render a decision, and communicate that decision and its rationale clearly
• Respond to the aggrieved party with more than a cursory legal notice. Show some sympathy.

This situation is reminiscent of Facebook’s 2007 Beacon debacle, when consumers and privacy advocates railed against the company’s advertising platform, which shared private user information with third party sites, seemingly without the user’s consent. Facebook dragged its feet with a response, and even two weeks after the first public criticism, according to BusinessWeek, “a spokesperson for the site declined to elaborate on the information, stating, ‘Facebook is listening to feedback from its users and committed to evolving Beacon.’”

Anyone who watched the Mark Zuckerberg vs. Sarah Lacy title bout at this year’s South by Southwest knows that Zuckerberg is not a professional communicator. But it’s the obligation of a CEO to know how to communicate. Jack Welch knows how. Steve Jobs knows how. John Chambers knows how. But if you’re a Web 2.0 CEO, apparently it’s uncool.

For a Web 2.0 company, Facebook has done an awful job engaging users in genuine dialogue. I wrote last year about the company’s awful blog, which I called “little more than a marketing blog.” It was not hard to see then that the company clearly did not get it when it came to authentic user engagement, so I was not surprised when they mishandled the Beacon situation.

So did Twitter’s leadership seek other than legal advice on handling this incident? Not exactly. In fact, in a blog post Saturday, they boasted, “We do not employ public relations professionals. This accusation caught us by surprise.” No kidding on both counts. It’s highly speculative on my part to assume that such counsel would have been contrary to the course Twitter actually took, or, that having received such counsel, Twitter executives would have chosen to follow it. (Yeah, they’re executives. Sorry.)

Mindless rejection of the value of public relations counsel by the Web 2.0 illuminati is just that. It’s mindless and potentially damaging to a company’s reputation. I would argue that Facebook, from a reputation standpoint, has not fully recovered from the Beacon backlash.

There are many notions underlying the predictions that PR is a dying industry. One of these is that PR is spin, that it is inauthentic, that it is contradictory to transparency and authenticity. A good PR person won’t “put words in the mouth” of an executive, but might be able to step back and look at the broader communications landscape and offer some advice. What if, instead of sending a CEO e-mail drafted by the legal department and hoping the situation would go away like an annoying rash, someone inside Twitter had said, “Do you really want people to think that strict enforcement of the TOS is our only concern? Ariel Waldman is an influential blogger, and she would be a good ally. She’s knowledgeable about this. Let’s invite her in for a conversation.”

Tags: arial waldman, beacon, Facebook, jack dorsey, mark zuckeberg, PR, Public Relations, sarah lacy, terms of service, tos, Twitter