Blogs help start-ups manage heated expectations.

Insurmountable opportunities.

That’s the term we started using during the Internet/telecom boom-boom 90’s to describe the dilemma faced by hot start-up technology companies whose buzz created more demand than they had capital, people and resources to deliver.

Back then I helped launch a few start-ups, including a company that merged to create today's Nextel and also Verio, now one of the world’s largest Internet and web-hosting companies.  Like all fast-growing new ventures, our communications functions were often preoccupied with responding to fallout from operational growing pains.  There were technology glitches and systems integration crashes.  There were contradictory sales materials and a mad rush to get customer care centers staffed with trained service people.

In that hyped dot-com world, even an isolated “scale problem” had the potential of becoming an even bigger PR crisis, swimming back upstream toward the company like a ticked-off salmon, mouth gaping and eyes bugging out in frantic frustration until being snagged for public consumption by a hungry trade magazine or local TV station.  Too many times,  we learned of customer ire by reading about it in a news article that grossly exaggerated the situation or took the whole thing out of context.  By that point, the company’s perceived lack of response to its customers had become a PR issue as well.

What we would have given for a blog or two.

I’m not sure what we’re calling this round.  Web 2.0.  Blogosphere.  Son of Telecom, First Blood Part II.  It does matter.  The point is that many of today’s start-ups seem more connected to the relationship between heated expectations and realistic build-outs.  And they’re using blogs to help them manage the two.

Case in point.  Houston PR executive and blogger John Wager criticized fast-growing blog tracking service companies Technorati and PubSub for being woefully out of date with their traffic and linkage statistics.  “I didn't ask these guys to go into business and get me hooked on the data they provide,” he wrote.  “Those stats are the primary basis for ranking your blog, so they are important. I don't understand why the service can capture an incoming link but can't immediately update your totals. Doesn't make sense.”

Within hours – literally – top executives from both companies responded by posting comments to John’s post.  They apologized, said they’re working to keep up with millions of blogs as fast as they can, and promised that improvements are on the way.

Had this been 1995, John Wagner might not have gotten a response at all.  Maybe the companies he criticized wouldn’t have noticed his complaint.  Or maybe they would have been too busy preparing for their IPO to be distracted by a single impatient Texan who doesn’t even produce revenue for them.

But this is 2006.  It’s a new Internet.  A new relationship between emerging technologies and the people who ultimately make them success stories.

And in Houston, there is one less angry end-user swimming upstream to find someone to complain to.

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Tags: John Wager, business, corporations, start-ups, Technorati, PubSub, Nextel,  venture capital