My friend, Chris Carfi, of Cerado, recently wrote about a concept called "beacons".
He describes them as the following:
"A beacon is a post in a public place, such as a personal blog, meant to draw the attention of a service provider to an issue the customer is having with the company's products. In essence, beacons turn the service model upside down, drawing companies to the customer's site to help them, rather than forcing the customers to go through the often onerous support process prescribed by the vendor organization."
Beacons are a fasinating example of the power that social media is putting into the hands of people. The way that companies react to these posts will be critical to their perception in the market place of the future.
Google provides a couple of great tools for watching for beacons via its Alerts and Blog Search Feed Subscriptions. These tools give you a free way to track online content activity around certain key words (e.g. your company name or your compeitors' names).
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