[scrollaway]

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)

[minimaxir]

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

[Turing_Machine]

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)

[blumkvist]

There are spokepersons and PR people...