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Jun 16
2008
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I use a service called "Twitter", which is an up-and-coming online conversation tool. (My Twitter account is: http://www.twitter.com/brentwilliams2 - feel free to follow me!) Essentially, it gives you 140 characters to post with, which gets posted to all of your "followers" news feeds on the site. It's actually a lot simpler than I'm sure you are thinking. Anyway, I posted a "Tweet" (that's what the posts are called) about a service I use called Jott, specifically some information that was in a Jott survey.
Anyway, to make a long story short, Jott was scanning the Twitter news-waves for its own name and the Director of Marketing personally emailed me to ask me to shut up about the survey (apparently, I wasn't supposed to talk about it per the survey user agreement). Although they weren't using it for this purpose, they could have easily been tracking mentions of their company name to get informal feedback from their customers who have posted about Jott. For example, a user might post, "Jott's interface is horrible, but I love the service anyway," which gives great, although non-specific, feedback. This user probably would not have taken the time to actually email Jott directly, so this is information that they would never have known about. Multiply that by several hundred and now you have a good set of feedback to work with. This way, they can get a sense of what they are doing right, what they are doing wrong, and even take steps to address it! I know that "evil" Comcast is trying the same thing, although I'm a little more pessimistic about their intentions...
(I know that I threw out a couple of services you may have never heard about before, so if you have any questions, feel free to message me)
