Transcripts

Jackie Huba, author of the book Citizen Marketers: When People are the Message…

For example, Starbucksgossip.com is a guy who writes about everything Starbucks and he points to news about Starbucks and a lot of employees hang out there and talk about Starbucks - it's like the Starbucks' water cooler. There's a woman who actually blogs about Target and the name of her blog is called slave to Target. And so what she does is she finds interesting products at the store or even on their website and she blogs about them - about how great they are and the different things you can do with them.

And some of these citizen marketers are beginning to have a real impact on the businesses they talk about.

A short story about a gentleman who bought a Dell computer and the computer was a big lemon. He started blogging about it, well what he was doing was un-surfacing big problems at Dell. All of a sudden now hundreds and thousands of people started blogging about how bad their Dell was - this started to appear in the mainstream media… cut to a year later the din was so loud that Dell had to start spending a hundred million dollars to improve their customer service. Now ordinary citizens can actually rise up and have such a voice that they're actually affecting change at companies.

At somethingyoushouldknow.net I'm Mike Carruthers and that' s Something You Should Know.