Listening to your market – Zemanta rocks!

I had a brilliant consumer moment yesterday. I blogged about a FireFox plugin called Zemanta that sits in your browser and waits for you to work on a blog post. As soon as it spots you’re doing this, it springs into life and stars offering content suggestions; pictures, links etc relating to what you’re typing about.

Well, the first time I tried it it didn’t work, I was slightly disappointed and blogged about the experience. Within a couple of minutes someone was knocking on my Google Talkback (top of my sidebar) requesting a chat. It was one of the staff at Zemanta ready to give me a hand getting the plugin working. I was flabbergasted at how “on the ball” these guys are, how attentively they’re watching the blogosphere and how helpful they were. This experience has literally redefined the expression “listen to your customer” for me.

How did they actually achieve this? Well, my blog posts are echoed on Twitter as I post them. They must have set up Twitter Tracking to watch for their company name and see what people are saying about them. This is a great feature; for example a real estate Branson company could monitor the word “Branson” to see what people are saying about the area they operate in.

I’m pretty impressed at Zemanta … shouldn’t all consumer driven companies be doing this?