Business Dilemma

Business 2.0 ranked "You - the customer" as one of the 50 people who matter now for 2006. Why You Matter according to Business 2.0: They have long said the customer is always right. But they never really meant it. Now they have no choice. You - or rather, the collaborative intelligence of tens of millions of people, the networked you - continually create and filter new forms of content, anointing the useful, the relevant, and the amusing and rejecting the rest. You do it on Web sites like Amazon, Flickr, and YouTube, via podcasts and SMS polling, and on millions of self-published blogs. In every case, you have become an integral part of the action as a member of the aggregated, interactive, self-organizing, auto-entertaining audience. But the You Revolution goes well beyond user-generated content. Companies as diverse as Delta Air Lines and T-Mobile are turning to you to create their ad slogans. Procter & Gamble and Lego are incorporating your ideas into new products. You constructed open-source and are its customer and its caretaker. None of this should be a surprise, since it was you - your crazy passions and hobbies and obsessions - that built out the Web in the first place. And somewhere out there, you are building Web 3.0. We do not yet know what that is, but one thing is for sure: It will matter.

PROJECT FOCUS:

There are numerous examples of customers having power on the Web. A few sites include www.ihatedell.net and www.donotbuydodge.ca.  Customers are using YouTube, MySpace, blogs, and a number of other Web tools to slam or praise companies.

• Do you believe that the most influential person in the cafe is the customer? If so, how could customers hurt or help the cafe?
• Will your employees agree that customers are the most important part of the cafe?