“Web 2.0″ means many things to many people. In my mind it has one simple definition:
We no longer live in a world where big companies dictate how we, the market, respond to their brand and product. As a result they don’t have control over their reputation. In the good old days (before Al Gore invented the Internet) a big company might get bad press in a newspaper or might hear a bad report on the TV or radio. Most of their complaints however came in via telephone or mail and with neither channel being public who would know if the company chose to ignore the complaint?
Some of us still rely on John Stossel or Arnold Diaz or Michael Moore to expose bad treatment of small people by big companies. But not all of us can expect our complaints to reach the screen via 20/20, Fox News or the local movie theater.
So how do the little people fight back?
With email and blogs and YouTube and most recently twitter that’s how. And the video you just watched demonstrates how one savvy consumer fought back when United Airlines damaged his guitar. Note that this video only represents one side of the argument but this one side has now been seen by over four million people. If you are head of marketing for United Airlines what goes through your head? I’m going to guess that it’s something like “Replacing that guys guitar would have been a lot less expensive than the cost of the lost business resulting from the video.” In 2009 everyone gets to hear about everything immediately.
As a Realtor your reputation is priceless but one pissed off client can easily write a negative blog post and trump all your best organic SEO efforts no matter how much time and money they cost. New reputation based services seem to appear monthly and all of them give your clients a free chance to tell the world how good, or bad, you do your job.
One way to fight back is to monitor social conversation related to you or your business. You can do that through free services like Google Alerts and twitter search. While it won’t stop the initial complaint being involved in the dialogue is certainly better than watching others talk about you from the sidelines. Comcast recently stepped into fray via their their Comcast Cares twitter account; it allows them to respond quickly to any negative twitter based commentary and according to media reaction it would seem their efforts are working.
And so I hope, having watched the video, you setup a Google Alert for your own name 
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Keep up the good work with your post – very informative!
Excellent points Stephen, everyone DOES have a voice in media today and it WILL be heard. It doesn’t matter if it’s by 2 ears, or 2,000,000 ears, if it goes viral, it can be really good, or it can be really bad.
With this new powerful social media movement, we ALL better go back to basics and focus on “Customer Service” just like the old days, when the gas station attendant came up to the car window and said, “How can I help you today?”