The Ruthless Awakening of the Masses

(Migrated weblog post from LSR)

After all the hype that has been going on around the recent issues with Apple’s latest gadget, the iPod nano, and its final and happy resolution that, hopefully, will make everybody happy, I guess that things will never be the same again. I have mentioned it already before here in my weblog. For the last few months we are just witnessing the ruthless awakening of the masses who consume whatever the product. Before, we were in a situation where consumers just didn’t know how others were using the same products they once bought and if they would be malfunctioning they would hardly make any noise about it, get a replacement (If they were lucky) and move on.

However, all that has now changed drastically. It all started with the Kryptonite lock scandal and just recently, apart from the example from the iPod nano, we have got the issue with MasterLock mentioned over at BoingBoing. Weblogs are giving the opportunity to consumers to share with one another their good, or bad, experiences about the different products they may have recently purchased. And as you can see they are just not keeping it quiet. All the other way around. The more noise the better, it seems.

I doubt that any large corporation could afford ignoring this ruthless awakening of the masses, as failure to do so will certainly bring them into some huge trouble that will become rather cumbersome to bypass. More and more webloggers are realising about this new power. Maybe that is why almost everybody has got a weblog, although not everyone, that is also true. Either way I doubt that companies cannot longer afford watching out what is happening out there in the Blogosphere. We have seen cases where ignoring such events will only create many more problems; thus you would expect that they would be reacting quick enough, right? But are they really doing so ? I am not sure what you would think but from what we have just seen I strongly believe it is not good enough. We shall see how things turn out in the end for Apple and the iPod frenzy, whether it is the iPod nano or whatever other product. Something tells me that there is going to be a significant impact but we will have to see and watch what happens. Will you be there to watch? I bet you will and, even more, I bet you will all be weblogging about it.