Listen, listen and listen. That's it, in a nutshell.

The Web is unique as a marketing environment in so far as your audience online is not static. The online audience comprises millions of active participants.

The Web is interactive, whether you like it or not. And your customers are live participants in the marketing process, whether you like it or not.

And as participants, they want something that most companies find hard to deliver.

Your customers want you to listen. They want you to tune in and hear what is on their minds.

There are a number of ways in which you can listen to what your customers are saying.

ONE - listen to your customers as they interact elsewhere on the Web.

This doesn't involve listening to customers through your own site. It simply involves being aware of where your prospects and customers interact on the Web. If, for example, you are in the software business, there are numerous discussion lists, newsgroups and forums through which you can listen to what people are saying about your products.

Or you can go to sites that aggregate customer experiences and reviews, like epinions.com.

In my book I talk about one company, Lawson Software, that went so far as to create and nurture a number of discussion lists at Topica.com. The results were excellent. Their users had a place in which to share their problems and solutions. And Lawson had a place where they could listen to their customers and REALLY find out what they wanted.

But even without a list devoted to your product or company, there are still many places online where you can listen in to what your customers are saying, thinking and feeling.

TWO - listen to what people say to your customer service agents.

Do you know where your company's customer services agents are located? If you work in a very small company, perhaps you do. But if you work in a larger company, those people may work in a different building, town or even country.

This is unfortunate, because your customer service agents are probably the only group of people who get to speak with your customers one on one. If you ever have the opportunity, spend some time sitting next to a few customer service people. Listen to what your customers are saying and listen to how your agents respond.

Also, read inbound customer service emails and go through the logs of recent instant messaging communications.

True, customer service communications tend to give you a view of your customers when they are unhappy and dissatisfied. But you're better off listening to your customers when they are complaining, than not listening at all.

THREE - encourage feedback from your site and from your emails and newsletters.

This is the big one. Here is where the online environment provides an incredible opportunity for you to benefit from customer participation in the evolution of your company, products and services.

With just a few clicks you can collect invaluable information from visitors to your site and readers of your outbound emails. You can genuinely interact with your customers and prospects. You can listen to them and learn from them.

The trouble is, in common with the vast majority of businesses online, you probably don't collect any feedback at all.

OpinionLab.com is one of the few companies that help business online collect direct, online customer feedback. Here is an excerpt from a white paper they published last year.

All but one of the [Media Metrix] Top 50 websites accepted feedback. However, the way in which feedback was collected indicated that most websites were not gathering feedback to provide comprehensive insights into user satisfaction.

High Burden

Nearly all of the Top 50 (92%) required the user to leave a page to provide feedback. On average, feedback systems were 2.2 clicks away and some were as many as 6 clicks deep. Only 50% of the websites maintained the feedback link in the same location on every page and only 10% made sure the link was visible at all times. Not a single site provided a scale for easy, one-click rating. All sites required the user to enter an open-ended message to provide feedback.

Intrusive

88% of the Top 50 requested, and 82% required personal information before they accepted feedback. By not allowing anonymous feedback, these sites were effectively eliminating potential respondents.

And that's just a taste of it. The short answer is that companies don't encourage a large inflow of customer commentary - because they don't want to allocate the necessary money and resources to handle it.

Imagine that. The Web is the only marketing environment in which you can encourage direct and immediate feedback from your customers 24 hours a day.

But we don't do it.

If we don't listen to our customers and prospects, if we don't know what our online customers want - how on earth do we know what to say to them?

So be sure to encourage feedback from your customers - through your site, your email programs and your newsletters.

Listen, listen and listen.