Friday, September 01, 2006

Chatting Web Strategy with Jeremiah

Several of us in the Product Department at Factiva had a conversation with Jeremiah Owyang, a thought leader at Hitachi Data Systems, this week about his use of one of our text-mining based products. He blogged about it and said some nice things about us.

He also spoke frankly to us about how our product wasn't serving his needs and what he thought we needed to do to make it better. That was the best part of the conversation. Praise is great, but it doesn't help you make better products. Well-thought-out criticism does.

Keep those cards and letters coming, Factiva users. We love 'em.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Glenn

Thank you for the open dialogue, both on the phone and hear on the public blogosphere. I admire companies that are willing to build with their customers a better company. This is a process I encourage at Hitachi Data Systems.

Let's not be too hard on ourselves, Insight does a great job at measuring enterprise data, and benchmarking key terms and phrases. This is baseline measurement for any marketing campaign and entry.

The challenge in today's multi-publisher world is now that consumers are publishers, so tracking this ever changing discussion is a task no one in the industry has been able to do perfectly. I suspect Factiva will be in the top tier of companies that will be able to provide this need to customers.

As we discussed, (and I notated gently on my blog) there are two types of 'listening' required. Active listening and charting/benchmarking.

I strongly feel that Insight is a great product for the latter, and will soon be able to do the first part.

Yes, we should put together a discussion in SF with some other folks that 'listen' to the blogosphere and discuss needs. I'm not sure if my needs are unique, or I'm among several.

In any case, it's great to put a face to the voice, I've subscribed to your blog.