Smart Companies are Listening

On my other blog (Dave's Blog) I recently wrote about our family trip to Canada, where we rediscovered Poutine, a delicious concoction of french fries, beef gravy and cheese curds. I speculated out loud that it would be a great new side dish for Culvers to add to its menu.

Less than 3 hours later, I had a response to my idea from Jim Doak, Culver's Director of R&D and Executive Chef!

Now that's impressive.

And it begs the question. How responsive is your company?

Are you monitoring Internet news sources, blogs and social networking sites for the mention of your company name, or products? Do you have a process in place to disseminate ideas, complaints, suggestions for internal action?

In the past, the traditional methods for gleaning this information would have been through focus groups, customer surveys or news clipping services. Or perhaps your company would be lucky enough to receive a letter, directed to the correct person, with a suggestion.

Expensive, clunky and time consuming.

Today you can easily setup a Google gadget to scour the web (sites, newsreaders, blogs) for specific mentions of company name, products or services and have the results sent to your desktop automatically. Free and immediate.

Really smart companies realize that ideas can come from anywhere.

And they're "listening".

And they're acting.

Are you?