Companies need to understand their customers in order to offer them what they want and need, and thus increase their sales. To do this, they can choose from a plethora of tools with which they can monitor e.g. how long online users stayed on a web site, where they came from, how many clicks they made etc. From the vast amount of data these tools provide, they can deduce things about the consumers’ behaviour, and their likes and dislikes. Or then, they could simply ask.
Asking someone what he or she likes is obviously a good way to get information. Surveys and opinion polls based on demographics indicate the opinion of an average representative of the chosen demographic group. But this approach has a few hitches, too. Doing a survey can be costly – and how reliable are answers from a group of people that might be paid to participate in various surveys? Besides, the best way to get the answer you want is to formulate the question correctly.
The best way to get real opinions of people is to listen to what they are talking about in their online discussions. Yes, the level of discussion on many forums is questionable, to say the least. But among the hundreds of thousands of the more mundane discussions happening every day online, there are the select few where people with real experiences about products and services talk with others. And it is those sites you should find and tap into. They are the sites you should be seen on. They are the sites from which you can find real feedback to use to develop your organization to better meet your customers’ actual needs.
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Kaija Pöysti is the Chairman of the Board of Whitevector. She is a serial entrepreneur whose first company did multilingual translation, testing and documentation services for all major IT companies. She has invested in several Web 2.0 companies, and has co-authored a book on Enterprise 2.0.
