Instant user feedback, analog style

Over the 4th of July holiday I was fortunate to stay at the Hope & Glory Inn in picturesque Irvington, VA. The experience was incredible, and while I could go on in four more posts about it, the one thing that really struck me while I was there was the reaction of the Northern Neck boating community to the July 4th fireworks show put on by the Tides Inn.

We took in the fireworks with some other Hope & Glory patrons on a cruise boat. After steaming up Carter's Creek to the Tides Inn we tied up at small dock and took in the spectacle. We were of course surrounded by boats on all sides of all kinds, either tied up or anchored in the "creek."

What I noticed after the fireworks started was that after a volley of a few rockets, boats all over would sound off by blowing their horns. After a while it became clear that the more impressive volleys got more honks of the horn. The regular pace of the show lent itself to this instant feedback, with the best fireworks getting three or four quick honks.

It struck me that this was a great example of consumers giving instant feedback on a product or service, a veritable real-time focus group on fireworks displays. Instead of Gallup control groups turning a dial during a political speech we had Virginia boaters sounding off on their favorite arrangement of holiday combustibles. Crowds of course do the same thing via applause, but I think this method was made more poignant by the fact that while the people watching were dispersed over a large area, the sound of their boats' horns was singular and carried over a long distance on the water.

This type of instant feedback is something I'm sure all the major brands out there would love to have from their consumers. As technology increasingly makes instant feedback possible, corporate entities, instead of asking consumers to respond directly to them about their products, are now able to effectively monitor the consumer "honking" via distributed communication channels. A case in point is Comcast Cable, which monitors Twitter for people complaining about their service. Comcast operatives even reach out via twitter to try and learn more about issues and lend whatever information they might have to help solve problems, though in my experience the later has been somewhat limited.

The art of this monitoring is something Jon Henke and company over at New Media Strategies have honed to a science, and to think that opinions that you as a consumer express online anywhere aren't being exhaustively tracked is niave. But it is interesting to think that at the end of the day, it's really just turning an ear toward who gets the most honks.