Yesterday I posted a short article about a promising software called McNucle that lets you set up your Mac at home as an advanced media server. A couple of hours after I posted it I got an email from Mr. Maarten Bruyninckx of the iNuron team. The people making McNucle:

Hi Eirik,

We noticed you reviewed our software on your blog. We’d like to thank you for taking the time to give our product a go and write about it.

If you have the time, could you tell us a bit more about the problems you had and what didn’t feel intuïtive to you. We’d certainly appreciate that as this kind of feedback is invaluable to us. We know the interface by heart after testing it for hours and hours… A fresh look on things always helps us to look at it from a different point of view.

Thanks again and good luck with your blog,

Maarten Bruyninckx & the iNuron team

This is a win-win-win-win-situation. I immediately think of iNuron as a serious company that listen to their customers. Chances that I remember them is instantly higher because of that mail. Chances that I write about them again (like right now…) is higher. And I will probably give them valuable feedback when I get back to the software and test it again.

I am not the New York Times or CNN, but I have between 800 and 900 subscribers on my RSS feed and thousands of unique visitors each week. If you have a quick look at this blog you will see that the content is mostly about media technologies and internet services. So, the people hanging out around here is probably pretty interesting for a company selling media server software.

And even better, the prize of that mail was a couple of minutes worth of writing. Cheap, effective and non-intrusive marketing if you ask me.

Some examples

I have experienced this a couple of times during my years as a blogger. Tim Cutting of Niveus media that immediately answered my pretty bad review of their remote control. Gibu Thomas of Sharpcast commenting on my review and communicating with my readers. Lucas of AmieStreet really listening and discussing their product and possible improvements on my blog. And other small signs of attention like Mary-Louise that works for Guy Kawasaki commenting and the quick “Thanks” from Jeff Jarvis.

And how do they do it?

Here are two (of many) solutions:

1. Follow the logs of your own web site. Look at the referrers. Suddenly you see that you have some traffic coming in from a strange place called eirikso.com or something similar. Check it out. If it’s a blog or a forum consider leaving a comment.

2. Subscribe to a search with your company and product names. Two places to do that could be Technorati or Feedster. Learn how to use an RSS reader and add a search feed. For the guys from iNuron this search at Feedster will always keep them up to date on blogs mentioning their product. Or this one at Technorati.

For corporate people that only check their email it is also easy to add such a feed to Outlook or run it through another service that can give you an email alert.

If more people knew this maybe companies like Lefdal would have commented on this one etc…

Now you have no excuse. Join the conversation.