The Steve Jobs Theory of Customer Relations - Joshua Gans - The Conversation - Harvard Business Review
Put simply, this is another way of crowd-sourcing customer feedback. In an age where the flow of information to large corporations might be overwhelming and noisy, it creates incentives for obtaining higher quality and timely information. For some corporations, a twitter account is playing this role. For Apple, the CEO is an active part of the game.
http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2010/12/customer_relations_from_the_to.html
