Clue sniffing. If you haven't already, go and read Cluetrain (and when you're done you can also enjoy the parody). Read the book for all the juicy details and entertaining prose (the book is free). I think the main observation (that markets are conversation) is an important one. It's a little vague, so let me give an example of a company that I think "has a clue". RackShack is just another provider of dedicated hosting services. What's interesting about them is that they seem to have the prices that blow the competition out of the water. I'm not a customer of any such hosting company but I'm interested and I did my fair of browsing and comparing prices and it looks like $99/month for a dedicated server with 400 GB of monthly transfer is just a killer offer (for example, at a reputable hosting company RackSpace the bandwidth alone would cost you $980). But we all know that there is no free lunch. Given that all other offers I've seen are so much more expensive I would probably just classify RackShack as a scam. But some browsing of their forums restores my confidence. So what's cluetrainish about RackShack? They engage in conversation with their customers. The head of the company frequently posts to forums, asks for user's opinions and answers people's questions. The company tries to be as transparent as possible (as opposed to presenting only polished, corporate image that people don't care about). They post information about the outages in the forum, explaining the reason for them and apologizing. The mere fact that they allow (unmoderated?) discussions among their users shows that they are quite confident that their product is good (negative comments would kill them quickly). Why is this important? Because when I'm finally in the market for a dedicated server hosting, RackShack will top my list.