Counting eyeballs & eardrums misses the point, it’s a human.

Companies that count their customers as body parts have lost them. Whenever I hear people at work refer to the number of eyeballs that do this or, the number of walk-ins who do that, I remind them that attached to these appendages are living breathing humans who think.

 

Humans will make or break a company, by firstly using their freedom of choice to choose the company’s product or service. Secondly, by conversing about their experience of the product/service with other humans. As long as the company product/service is satisfying the customer’s need everything is peachy, but if the customer is dissatisfied…
 
Those companies today that fail to capture that “conversation” and utilise its powerful marketing intelligence, will not be around to see business tomorrow.

 

I was recently in a meeting with financial service company where the owner of the business told me that the most important thing to the company was their shareholders and staff. As long as they were happy, he believed he would have satisfied customers. My comment to that was, no company anywhere would be in business without its customers.

 

So, seeing this article in the NYTimes about Podcasting and how they will be counting eardrums next, pretty much shows the same Old World Media views that technologies such as Blogging and Podcasting will eventually erode away into oblivion.