*S.O.B. = Sounds Obvious But... (not what you were thinking)

Early last week I took time out of my very busy work schedule to research and cold-write two organizations about proposals I had considered to cross-promote each other's work.  I emailed a specific contact (not a generic "info" email address) at one and filled out a website contact form for the other.  To date I have not heard back from either.

Now, it's possible that either or both of my requests did not go through.  This is very unlikely in the case of the contact form, and much more so with my email.

Still, these days a real person should have a spam filter – and should check it daily.  Or better yet, configure it to send the person a daily email update of all messages that it catches.  We use AppRiver and love it (at least, I do).  Since 99% of our legitimate correspondence comes from the U.S., it's easy to sort by country and then find any emails I want to read that did not make it into my inbox.

So both people I was contacting should have seen my requests by now.  Then it's a question of how highly they regard me.  Apparently it's low enough to not elicit a response – in the case of the website form, not even an auto-generated reply, which I consider to be the e-marketing version of the finger.  If your company can't reply as a real person or merely as "the system" within 24 hours, you shouldn't be in business (IMHO of course).

So now I'm left to float between the following views of these enterprises:

• They're not interested and are "too busy" to let me know.
• They might be interested and are "too busy" to let me know.
• They are definitely interested but are still "too busy" to let me know.

None of these is particularly flattering from the perspective of a potential customer (I'm lumping "marketing partner" in the customer category).  I would love to remove the quotes around "too busy" above because I don't think anybody should ever be too busy to respond to someone's request – I'll take an auto-reply; I'm a webmaster and am used to them!  But in this case I must leave those quotes where they are.

One thing's for certain: I'm going to think long and hard before I contact these folks for anything in the future.  If I were a regular customer, that would not be good news for them, especially since I might not keep them anonymous and might instead pull a very public Jeff Jarvis on them.

In my view, your workplace team building and employee engagement best practices can be an asset when it comes to responding to people.  Sure, most requests will not be doable.  But don't you owe it to the folks whose might be to build in processes that guarantee a reply and an eventual review by a real person?

What's your take?  Am I treating "the customer is always right" too liberally?