/The importance of talking with your customers

The importance of talking with your customers

In the business and institutional world, blogs are usefull for suppliers of services and products to get to know their clients a bit better, so that they can be faithfull to them and also innove. That’s why I love Martín Varsavsky’s work with Fon (to model the product according to the opinion of its future consumers); and that’s why I do also like ‘20 Minutos‘ director’s decision to ask the audience about the topics that keep them awake. ’20 Minutos’ is the most read generalist newspaper in Spain.Arsenio Escolar has been sleeping over the convinience of including ads from Interviu (a Spanish magazine with a naked woman on the front paga) on the newspaper. The commercial managers backed the idea because it would mean more money. And the owners too (Zeta not only has shares from 20 Minutos, but it also owns Interviu). But the editors doubted about it, since many readers are young and female.So Escolar, the only director of a Spanish newspaper who writes a blog, decided to ask the audience: “What do you think? Should we admit this kind of advertising? In any page, only inside, nowhere? In a smaller format, without pictures?”, he asked, before writing that he was very interested in the internauts opinion and that he will take it into account to make his mind up.We all know that this would have been impossible some time ago. Asking the users would have meant a very expensive sociologic study, that wouldn’t have taken into account the smaller opinions. But the change is just technological. For Escolar, becoming a blogger has helped him to be much nearer the readers opinions. Consequently, I think that ’20 Minutos’ is, today, the most innovative Spanish newspaper, and also the one that approaches the most to their customers’ demand.