Factiva, A company that listens, and then listens more

As a customer of Factiva, I was very pleased to have a conversation with the product teams, I was invited to a concall with the product managers located both in Bay Area to New Jersey.

I expressed my needs to find tools that will help me to monitor the blogosphere and all other kinds of ‘participant produced’ content –it’s a big task. We talked about long tail vs influencers, impact of audio, video, and the impacts on corporate reputation. We talked about active listening and reporting, and how you need both, to date, I’ve yet to see a tool that can do both well, but when I do, I’ll tell the whole world.

A few days ago, I forwarded them the meme “What should companies be Monitoring” it was a large discussion that bounced around the blogosphere (35 links to my post alone), and even went to Marketing Guru Joseph Jaffe –it’s important stuff.

I love it when companies listen, something that I lead at my company, and I love it when they involve customers as a data point to help craft their strategy. I don’t expect them to make drastic or immediate changes just because of my opinion (in fact I’m just one of many voices that matter) but it was a healthy conversation.

1) Factiva is a company that customers pay to listen to the market,

2) They also do a great job of listening to customers, reading blogs, talking, and having conversations .

See how Daniela, an employee there also listened and responded to me via YouTube –companies of the future will build products WITH customers using the conversational web as a tool. Of course, the next step is to take all these data points (I’m one of many) connect the dots to make the big picture and include in the product futures.

Update: I’ve given some thought about our conversation yesterday. One question was posed to me: “What matters most, the influential voices (well known bloggers) or the smaller bloggers”. I didn’t have a good answer right at the time, but it’s very clear to me that it’s ‘All’ the voices. I’ll bet the voices in my industry (which I’m tracking) are not all influencers or have a lower (better) technorati rank. In fact, my technorati rank is lower than most bloggers in much of the data storage industry. It’s not my voice that matters of course, it’s the small voice that influencers others. If all of the bloggers on this page are being picked up (and others like them) then I think that’s a good start.

Update 2: The ever-patient Glenn has responded to me from his blog. To read his thoughts and reports on blog spam, interesting and likely very valid.  David Sifry should respond.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 31st, 2006 at 3:39 am and is filed under Community Marketing, Social Media, Voice of the Customer. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.