Listening

In Chapter 5, Hobbies and Altruism, of Citizen Marketers the authors recount the story of how Eric Karkovack was able to revive a dead soda, Surge, via raising awareness and recounting personal stories with the soda on his website SaveSurge.org. Consequently, CocaCola re-released the soda as Vault, in part due to his large online following and community.

Furthermore, the story explains how his new website dedicated to Vault, significantly outranks CocaCola's own site for the beverage because he created and expanded his site with more passion and most importantly was willing to listen to his audience.

To me this is a theme that we see time and time again across internet advertising. Companies ignoring their audience and only presenting the message that they think is appropriate. Whether it be in failed twitter marketing plans or boring websites, the theme is consistent that people want to feel like they are apart of something and involved, and in order for that to occur someone needs to be listening.

When companies refuse to listen to their consumers and don't give them the opportunity to express themselves the companies, in the end, are very much hurting themselves. That is what separates the internet from so many other mediums of communication: it allows millions of people to easily be heard and to ignore these opportunities is social suicide.