On my flight to LA last week, in Spirit (the Southwest Airlines’) Magazine, I read about Arthur Rosenfeld and his random act of kindness in a drive-through line at a Starbucks in Florida. For those of you who missed it, the guy in the car behind Rosenfeld got angry because Rosenfeld hadn’t moved his car forward enough to free up space at the microphone. The guy in back lost it – honking and yelling. Rather than reciprocating the insults, Rosenfeld, a Tai Chi master, calmly told the barista that he wanted to pay for the coffee of the guy behind him. He paid the tab for the honker, which actually set off a spontaneous chain reaction of people paying for the next car’s coffee that lasted throughout the day.

While it’s true that Starbucks promotes angel behavior by encouraging “cheer chains” during the holiday season, Arthur Rosenfeld said that he had never heard of such a promotion. He said he did it to steady himself – to quell his own anger. But it was the unexpectedness and the stark contrast of his action that moved the honker, and the car after and the car after and the car after…

The story made me think on the random acts of kindness that I have encountered, personally. Thank you to the “trail angels” who have left snacks and water out along hiking trails for me to find. Thank you to the man in the green shirt at the airport this weekend who bought us a bottle of water after overhearing my daughter complaining of thirst and me explaining we couldn’t get out of the boarding queue. And on and on…

But Arthur Rosenfeld’s story also made me think about the marketing world, in which we often face angry customers, ranting on their blogs or in emails to customer support. Instead of yelling back, or issuing a cease and desist, or even ignoring the whiners, what if the company did the unexpected? Invite a particularly angry customer to the company headquarters to meet with the product team so that they can properly express their frustrations. Even a personal note sent from a person who matters at the company is unexpected enough (in this day and age) as to potentially turn the angry tide.

That’s what Dell did. It asked the angry Jeff Jarvis to the Dell headquarters to meet with the CEO. And while it wasn’t the meeting by itself that turned Jeff around, but the series of proactive changes that Dell put in place afterward, Jeff Jarvis ended up pretty happy. So tell the lawyers to step down. Tell your own employees to step up and to connect. You never know what might come of it.

In this week’s installment of his ‘Circuits’ column, David Pogue asks, “Are you taking advantage of Web 2.0?” By ‘you’ he means your company, and he describes the response this question got from the attendees at a recent PR conference:

“…within seconds, there were 132 responses on the screen in a huge, scrolling list. ‘Not enough money.’ ‘Don’t understand it.’ ‘No technical resources.’ ‘Not enough manpower.’ ‘No visible return on investment.’ ‘Fear of ridicule.’ ‘Fear of slander.’ ‘Fear of permanence.’ ‘Fear of the public running amok.’”

There are lots of common fears in there, and they’re all reasonable at first glance. Companies are understandably afraid of opening themselves up to ridicule and slander from a public running amok, knowing that all the messy results will live forever, just a Google search away. And they’ve seen some embarrassing failures from companies who’ve tried to embrace the new paradigm - like the Chevy Tahoe debacle, and Wal-Mart’s fake blog (or flog) scandal, to name just two incidents. So the safest bet is to simply stay away from all things Web 2.0.

The problem with this approach, obviously, is that the public is already running amok. That’s what the public does. If they want to slander you, they have YouTube and MySpace and a million other places to do it. Sticking your head in the sand doesn’t make all this stuff go away. It just makes your company look silly - or worse, aloof, uncaring and behind the times - and ultimately more vulnerable to whatever mud they might be slinging.

So if it’s unwise - or unrealistic - to stay out of the fray, then what’s the best strategy for jumping in? The other questions from the PR conference attendees fall into this category. More and more companies have recognized the need to participate, but they don’t know where to focus or how much to invest.

There are lots of success stories. Big companies like Dell and Mariott have generated good will and good press through their forays into Web 2.0, and this has surely translated into dollars. But it still comes down to the question of ROI. If one of the ultimate goals of embracing Web 2.0 is to engender good will, then how do you quantify it? How do you measure success?

Does anyone out there have a story that starts to quantify the actual value of good will?