Companies big and small have to monitor the blogosphere for mentions of their names, period. Ignoring customers threatens any business, and turning a deaf ear to the grumblings of the customer base will absolutely lead to a PR crisis.
The latest casualty is Dell's customer support department. Jeff Jarvis of Buzzmachine chronicles his poor experience here.
Steve Broback, of the Blog Business Summit picks up the issue and broadens it out a bit here.
If some smart flack inside of Dell's internal PR department (and I know at least one) had a PubSub subscription set up to monitor what people were saying in the blogosphere, Steve Broback, myself and others might never have had a chance to write about this. Dell's PR firm seems to have dropped the ball, too.