Jim Lynch: Off the Top of My Head…

Interesting story in today’s Wall Street Journal (sorry you need a subscription to read the whole thing) about how companies have wised up to the power of bloggers.

People who rave online about their favorite new gadget — or gripe about the products they hate — are turning heads in the business world.

The growing popularity of blogs and other online forums has prompted companies to pay more attention to what is being said about them on the Internet, and has given rise to a new kind of market research aimed at finding useful information in the sea of online chatter.

Paying attention to online communities is a very shrewd, very smart decision for a company to make. Yes, there’s a lot of noise in both kinds of communities but there’s also a lot of valuable feedback and ideas for future product releases.

It’s a foolish, stupid company that refuses to pay attention to what is being said about it online. Word of mouth can be an incredibly powerful thing for any company’s products.

Remember Intuit and their awful DRM? Word spread like wildfire about that online and it ended up costing them customers. They took the hint and reversed course but if they had paid closer attention to what their customers were saying about them online in the first place, they could have avoided the whole mess. :roll:

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