Business Consultant Ted Demopoulos Offers Tips to Help Businesses Easily Get Customer Feedback

Smart companies spend a lot of time and money trying to get feedback from customers via surveys, focus groups and more. Now it's easy to get feedback by monitoring what customers are saying.

"Customers have always talked about companies, their products, and their services. Now with over 50 million people blogging, some are blogging about your company," says Ted Demopoulos, co-author of "Blogging for Business." "It's easy to listen in. Often a few minutes a week will uncover surprising customer information that other research methods miss."

When Dan Entin wrote in his blog Two Percent Nation that he couldn’t find his favorite deodorant, Degree Sport Solid, Unilever shipped him a case and a list of local stores that carried it. Unilever, the company that manufactures it, was listening. He wrote about it and Unilever received tremendous buzz.

Other companies, for example Land Rover and Dell, have received negative buzz. Blog monitoring would have revealed these attacks on the companies’ reputations early and allowed the companies to address them quickly.

"Listening to what people are saying about you in blogs is simple," adds Demopoulos. "Free blog search engines like Technorati, Bloglines, and Google Blog Search are easy to use, free, and amazingly effective."

Ted Demopoulos is a writer and consultant who helps companies profit from the intersection of technology and business. He blogs on new media and business at www.bloggingforbusinessbook.com.