If Web 2.0 marketing is about listening to customers, just WHO do you listen to?

Kathy Sierra created (when she was blogging), what I believe to be an essential bit of reading for any wannabe Web 2.0 marketer and sums it up very nicely in just one illustration below:

As a new-age or social media marketeer, you want to let the community guide you. You want to earn your community’s trust and respect by (at least!) look as if you are listening to them.

But then you realise that there are 10,000 opinions and suggestions about what to do with your product, how to improve it, what colour to make it etc., you suddenly realise why conventional marketing dictated to the customer!

Kathy suggests some great ways of handling these comments by categorising as many groups as possible and suggesting ways in which they could be treated.

Essential reading for anyone pondering letting go of your brand to your customers.

{lang: 'en-GB'}

PAGES / FORWARD OR BACK?
Previous: A survey worth bookmarking
Next: Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Sailor - which one are you?

http://webdeveloper2.com Dave Kinsella

I like the 37 signals method detailed in Getting Real (http://gettingreal.37signals.com/). All suggestions and ideas start life in the reject pile. You’ll know if they’re worth anything if they keep cropping up again.
On a related note, I’ve been trying out crowdsound (http://www.crowdsound.com) as a tool for gathering user ideas and feedback on those ideas. It’s a neat service.
http://blendingthemix.com paul.fabretti

interestingly, I had only ever heard of the book because it was one of those cluetrain freebies online - but totally relevant to the subject of my post.

As for crowdsound - wowsers. What a find!

So it doesn’t have the complexity or depth of CRM that salesforce’s ideaforce (on which Idea Storm and My Starbucks Idea) are built, but from the point of view of providing a means for feedback, this is a brilliant tool.
http://webdeveloper2.com Dave Kinsella

“wowsers”? - you’ve watched too much inspector gadget! - but yes, crowdsound is great considering it took me 5 minutes to setup for Biofind.com and populate with the first batch of ideas that we were considering.
The feedback is way more important than the CRM aspects in this case. Horses for courses as they say

If Web 2.0 marketing is about listening to customers, just WHO do you listen to?

A proud member