Consumer Revolution

I am in the middle of the book “Join The Conversation” by Joseph Jaffe and I am really compelled by the fact that consumers have so much power.

Sites like this: www.my3cents.com are popping up everyday giving consumers places to vent and be heard. You can read horrible stories of lack of service, up charges, and shady contracts.

Other sites focused on ranking particular industries are popping up everyday too:
http://www.ratemyprofessors.com/
http://www.ratemds.com/social/

Organizations that are not tuning in to what consumers are saying will benefit from listening and as Jaffe says, “Joining the conversation”. I am also digging his blog: http://www.jaffejuice.com/
I don’t want to become a “mouse potato”, but it is going to be hard with all of these interesting conversations going on about business and marketing!

Hey stalkers

Tonight when I googled "JD Valerio" I noticed that this blog came up first in my organic search rankings. It got me thinking, what if someone googled my name looking for one of my music performances, and they found this site first? Might as well make it easy for them. So, I am going to start posting my performances on this blog (when I remember to do so).

Tomorrow night in Minneapolis, I'll be playing at the EP Atelier. It is located at on 10th between Park and Portland. Here is their website: www.epatelier.com

Social Media Marketing in 2009 and Beyond

I just started reading a book called "Join The Conversation" by Joseph Jaffe. According to the front cover, the book is about "how to engage marketing-weary consumers with the power of community, dialogue, and partnership". The book inspired me to post here.

Part of "joining the conversation" means being transparent. I heard a perfect example of the power of transparency marketing last Friday.

My friend and I were talking about the value of transparency on retail website blogs and he told me about his experience shopping online for a hiking shoe. The company that he buys hiking shoes from allows consumers to post their opinions about the shoes they sell. One of the posts for a shoe my friend was considering buying read something like, "I don't think this shoe is very good because it slips easily on granite." My friend told me that since the company didn't remove that post, he trusted the site even more. My friend has trust in the company and is likely to buy his next pair of hiking shoes from that company because they are willing to showcase both the strengths and weaknesses of their product online from their customers' point of view. Guess what, since my friend shared that with me, I am interested in checking out that shoe company too!

I like this idea of transparency in marketing and hope it continues to take off.