Market places have become driven by web users

”If you make customers unhappy in the physical world, they might each tell 6 friends. If you make customers unhappy on the Internet, they can each tell 6,000 friends. If you do build a great experience, customers tell each other about that. Word of mouth is very powerful.” said Jeff Bezos, the CEO of the Amazon.com. Your company is not the subject of potential conversations and attack that are broadcast over the internet. People are now able to publish their personal views easily using a few simple online tools.

With the creation of Web 2.0 media services, users of the internet have become active participants who can write and distribute information on their own. Users can publish their own blog, post comments of news sites such as Digg and Newsvine, can interact with friends on Facebook, publish photos and videos on sites such as Flicker and YouTube and can give their opinions of products and services on consumer opinion platforms such as Consumer Review.

Nowadays, if a company decides not to participate on the internet, its customers will often times do it for them effectively becoming the public voice of the company. And people do look and do care about public opinion.

Think of the most recent large purchases you made. Didn’t you go online and see what other internet users were saying about the product or services? Does anyone really rely now solely on a brochure to make large purchases?

Through the internet, every company and every individual has the potential to become the object of both positive and negative feedback. Rumors, once small in scope, are now spreading on the internet at different rates depending on the individual circumstances. Conversations on 2.0 media need to be carefully analyzed in order to anticipate any possible larger-scale proliferation towards the classic mass media (radio, TV, print media) and halt potentially disparaging remarks about your organization.

There are virtually no rules cast in iron in the world of rumor-spreading on the net: a rumor may spring from a blog and then be picked up by a radio station, or conversely begin on television in a program with a small audience and then be repeated on a multimedia platform (YouTube, Dailymotion) and subsequently viewed by millions. One thing is for sure: traditional media now have to include (or even incorporate through diversification) new Web 2.0 media to cope more effectively with high speed information creation and circulation.