Are you listening to your customers?
I recently blogged about Geni.com. Shortly afterwards I had a comment from Geni thanking me for “checking out our website”, asking me to”Stay tuned as we add other great features to our site”.
Now I like to think I’m popular, but I doubt that anyone on the geni team subscribes to my blog and it is doubtful they just stumbled across my words. More likely they used Google Alerts. Now there is no reason for marketing departments not to know what people are saying about their organisation. PR is changing, it is no longer enough to carefully manage the messages that are broadcast from the organisation and be deaf to what your customers, critics and champions are saying about you (other than in satisfaction surveys and mystery shopper exercises – which tend to be occaisional, anonymous and a rather blunt instrument for addressing individual customer issues). Now there is no excuse for not hearing what is being said, when it is being said. Google Alerts does the listening for you. What you choose to do about it is another; copy and paste the offending article into a email to be circulated to an Action Team who might eventually address the issue, or engage in a dialog with the blogger as Geni (and Norwich Union) did.