A few recent threads have me wondering something. How many of the MRR industry manufacturers/distributors/dealers are poking around in this particular forum?
We know Walthers is looking in from time to time, same with Jason from Rapido. Dave from High Country Hobbies made a welcome appearance a few days back; there must be others.
Who else is listening?
Stu
Rod Stewart ?
I would imagine that all the larger companies have someone who “listens” in from time to time just to see what is said about them if nothing else.
Enjoy
Paul
If they don’t, they should.
Good luck getting them to stand up and raise their hands, though. They have to be careful that their posts aren’t mistaken for advertising.
Most of them probably just use Google once in a while to see what is going on. To dedicate people to monitoring mailing lists and web based forums would consume a lot of time with little return for the effort. For a small shop, it would be very costly.
A lot of feedback will be via their dealers and distributors.
If they do read the forum, they’re most likely lurkers who don’'t even have accounts.
With regards to HO and N scales…this forum is well known and is or has been regularly visited, via the web, by persons from: Athearn, Atlas, Broadway Limited, Details West, Intermountain, MTH, Rapido, River Point Station, and Walthers.
This is based on my phone/email discussions with reps from these companies. At times I’ve shared info from reps (after getting permission). Understandably, a few reps have posted here before but not often. The caution is not just out of concern of being accused of “free advertising”. Reps also try to be careful in that their posts don’t unintentionally convey opinions or messages that could be misinterpreted that may result in the company or its competitor being cast in a negative viewpoint.
Some of you may remember that back in the mid 2000s, there were a number of “MTH vs QSI” related threads here. MTH’s rep (Andy) made a number of posts here to help quell down the concerns model railroaders had about the dispute between MTH and QSI regarding a command control feature. Instead, things grew hotter, and Andy got roasted quite a bit. (I’m glad those days are gone). Things are much more civil today and now some of those upset modelers purchase MTH products.
This harkens back to former moderator “Bergie’s” suggestions that it’s good for us to always be civil. The manufacturers don’t read our forums exclusively for planning upcoming models or runs, but they check on us for a cross sectional “feel” as to what model railroaders are doing, purchasing, and trending towards. However, the manufacturers still rely heavily on the dealers/distributors f
I don’t know about here, but one of the woodworking sites I visit regularly gets inputs from the president of Grizzly tools and Lee Valley, as well as occasional others. The fact they take the time to visit and help solve customer’s problems has built a lot of good will toward those companies.
My guess is that someone in the IT department (or that someone who IS the IT department) has a bot that scans the forums for relevant posts and forwards them to the person respnsible for responding (PR dept or Marketing or whoever). At the smaller companies, it probably is just someone who has reading the forums in his job description.