Jackie Danicki

Dave Winer and Robert Scoble, to name just two notables, have been blogging recently about how there is a lot of money to be made for companies who are willing to listen to what their blogging customers have to say. The way companies tend to work now with bloggers is that, if you’ve got a highly-trafficked blog related to their product (for me, it’s the beauty blog, for which I receive many shipments of freebies to review each week), they send you their product(s) in the hope that you’ll give them a rave review and a link. Dare to give some less-than-thrilled feedback, and they get can get rather huffy.

To give an example away from the technology ground of Winer and Scoble, check out what happened when I blogged a note of constructive criticism - and a commenter on my post added their own disappointment as a customer - to the creator of major make-up brand Stila.

The person I was addressing, Jeanine Lobell, found my note through Google (we rank on the first page of searches for her name) and left a snarky comment. Oh, but guess what? The point the commenter made - about the flimsiness of the company’s packaging - was valid enough that Stila introduced a new product which addresses the problem. Still, Lobell couldn’t resist getting sarcastic with good, evangelistic customers (my post praised the colour in question as the best I’d ever found, and no, it wasn’t a freebie; I bought it, and many other Stila products, with my own money). Now things are getting really interesting in the comments to my post, and other Stila constituents are not happy.

Filed under: Life