Full Circle Associates

Lisa Williams blogged about her experience as a landlord using Craigslist to find tennants at 3:46 pm on December 3rd (a Saturday). It wasn't such a hot experience. By 6:58 pm Craigslist founder, Craig Newmark had commented and said "Hey, i’m sorry that happened, but our feedback suggests it’s an unusual exception." Not a big huge post nor an excuse. Just an acknowledgement and a bit of data. By 10:53 Lisa had replied.

"Wow. I know you’re a real person…yet I feel as though my blog has had a supernatural visitation.

Yes, the three no-shows in a row did leave me pretty cranky. I did get a lot of good tips in the forums from other small landlords about how to reduce the number of no-shows. That was nice.

I’ll try again. "

Text book example of what can happen when you use online media to "hear" what people are saying, and even better yet, show you are listening as a real person.

The application is obvious for business, but I'd go way further than that. NGOs and NPOs, distributed teams and communities. We have to listen. We have to show we are listening.

Now the downside (and related to my earlier post on multimembership). How can we cope with all this listening we have to do? Craig replied on a Saturday. Life goes on. How to balance?

Categories: craigslist, listening, blogs, multimembership