My Vodpod, clues, and the power of the blogosphere

I was blown away this morning to find an email in my inbox from the CEO of VodPod, Mark Hall.
It was as a result of one line I wrote on this blog yesterday, a throw-away mention that I'd like to have added a particular video to My Vodpod (which you'll find in the left column of this blog) but that it wasn't working at the time.

Pre-Cluetrain companies might have set the bots looking for references to themselves and then sent out automated 'please accept our profound apologies for this inconvenience' emails to all and sundry. You know the sort. You get them from google from time to time.

Mark did rather better. Hope he won't mind me quoting from his email - I'm guessing he gets the open-silo'd approach to markets as conversations, since he uses such a human voice.

"Hi David-

I'm at Vodpod, and saw your note on your blog about Vodpod hanging. Apologies for that, we had some problems with the service overnight (our time).

"We launched a year ago today, so typical we'd encounter some gremlins on that day, in the middle of the night of course.

"Seeing your post led me to your blog... I'm going to be in London next week... and wanted to suggest getting a coffee if you happen to be in the city during that time.

"I'll also be over at LeWeb on Tuesday and Wednesday next week if you happen to be there. Would love to talk to you more about Vodpod, and what we're doing generally."

"Also: we just released some nifty new blog widgets, details here.

"Again, apologies for the problems last night.

"Cheers,
Mark".

And I'm impressed. I feel even better about Vodpod than I did before. I'm talking about it some more (hello? THIS is marketing). I'm even happy to hear about some new widgets Mark tags on to the conversation (some more marketing - which I'm happy to be complicit in!)

What a great illustration of the power of the blogosphere and proof of the idea of marketplace as conversation.

For those of you thinking this is all very well but how could we possibly ever deal with every customer this way? Imagine the value of this one conversation between Mark and I - now that it's being shared.

Yes Mark - I'd be delighted to drink coffee with you. I'll be contacting you right away!