pe.ma Pema Hegan's collection of news and ideas too long for a tweet

Sutori: Blast Radius goes to work for customers as well as clients

I was finally introduced to Sutori this week by a friend that works at Blast Radius, a digital agency with Canadian offices in Vancouver and Toronto. Sutori is a site that lets people rate products they buy and encourages corporations to participate and react to the feedback.

Sutori in their own words:

We believe that today's customers have more power than ever. Power to make informed choices. To connect with each other and share unbiased advice, opinions and stories.

We've created Sutori to channel that power. To capture the stories that bind us all together in our shared lives as customers. And to make it easy for companies to listen to and learn from those stories.

Sutori was created by a small team at Blast Radius, and from what I can gather it was built on company time. I've always respected Blast from a distance for their commitment to innovation, good management and honesty. I've lost count how many times I've been told stories by current and past employees about how great their policies are and what a good working environment they have created. In fact, when I was editor at Dose magazine we wrote a story about what a great place Blast is to work.

But Sutori looks like a cool initiative even for a company like Blast.

The idea that the world is a different place now and that customers can talk back to corporations seems to be, unfortunately, still a pretty novel concept in the advertising world. Blast have obviously come to terms with this and have decided to create a dialog not just between their clients and customers, but between anyone and any corporation who will listen.

I hope that Blast are encouraging their clients to participate to Sutori: to listen to what customers like and what they don't like about their products, and to react accordingly. I think that this will not only be the key to success for Blast's clients, but also the key for Sutori. Sutori needs to be a place for customers to organize their opinions and then get corporations to listen, not just a place to complain. If they can achieve this then I think Sutori will gain momentum and become a valuable tool for all of us and all of the corporations who market to us.

I wish them the best of luck.

Appendix (can a blog post have an appendix?):

From Sutori's FAQs here is a bit more info about them:

What is Sutori?

On Sutori, you can rate companies by posting stories about your experiences with them.

Each story is accompanied by a "goodwill rating", which contributes to the goodwill meter—an aggregated view of how the Sutori community feels about each company.

When other users read your story, they have the option of leaving a comment or voting to agree or disagree with you.

To reflect the power of consensus, stories with many "agree" votes have a stronger impact on the goodwill meter. Similarly, stories with many "disagree" votes have less of an impact.

In addition to a centralized goodwill meter where companies can track how customers feel about them and why, Sutori also includes a mechanism whereby companies can post official responses to any story.

You can also check out the Sutori blog here.