Listen, or pay up...

Companies are tuning in to blogs to talk to their customers. The results aren't always to their satisfaction "" but they're learning.

If only you took time to get out of your self-righteous world..." wrote Meow FM's Anil Srivatsa in his comment to a post on Tripta Chandola's personal blog. She had written about his talk show, "Between the Sheets", taking exception to the deliberately risque format. Fortunately, this conversation turned civilised and resulted in Chandola, a PhD student in anthropology, being offered a job at Meow FM.

Why was a station's chief operating officer responding to comments on an obscure blog? "I constantly keep in touch with what the buzz is out there," says Srivatsa, explaining the utility of tracking listener opinions thus: "In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. I am the one-eyed king."

In a more systematic way, many companies now listen to what people say about them on the Internet. Sometimes it can lead to unpleasantness, such as the reported reaction by the Indian Institute of Planning and Management in 2005 to critical posts by blogger Gaurav Sabnis. The incident raised a storm on Indian blogs around the world.

Thousands of complaints by bank customers are on blogs and websites such as complaintsboard.com. The numbers are so large that some banks insert letters asking consumers to write in or call their helplines. However, frustration with the ordinary complaints procedure is usually what drives customers online to spread the bad word.

Increasingly, company behaviour is shaping consumer judgement. Dell recently experienced this firsthand. A former Dell sales manager in the US posted on consumerist.com (slogan: "Shoppers bite back"), describing ways to get better deals on Dell computers. A company counsel demanded the post's removal. Consumerist.com refused, and dozens of readers and bloggers agreed with it. Within two days Dell backed down and apologised.

But they did it in style "" on their consumer interaction website, Direct2Dell. "Now's not the time to mince words, so let me just say it...we blew it," wrote Lionel Menchaca, digital media manager.

Last year, travel portal Cleartrip.com started a blog. Its representatives found themselves responding politely to comments like "You [are] the most incompetent buffoons." This month, the company set up the Cleartrip Forum for customer interaction.

Through the Internet, consumers are not only talking back to companies, but also with each other. The result is that businesses no longer completely control their own brands. In the West, the marketing environment has been changing to accommodate this new reality. In India, the process is only just beginning.