How do your customers find you? How will they next year?

OK, so this is a couple weeks old, but it’s definitely still worth mentioning. Steve Rubel recently wrote about the coolest thing I’ve seen in the last year. A few folks from the University of Maryland Baltimore County put together Feeds That Matter, a site that interprets Bloglines user data to create a tag cloud showing the top blogs Bloglines’ users read. On one day I visited baseball showed up in the Top 500 tag cloud, while football did not. Neither did NFL, basketball, NBA, NHL, etc. Travel showed up, but not air, hotel, or cruise. Marketing was bigger than Media or Advertising. Google, bigger than Yahoo, but MySpace didn’t appear. TV, but no TiVo. Xbox, but not Playstation. Politics, but not government. And so on. Clearly these represent the interests of the folks that did the writing, but remember that these folks are well positioned to influence a fair bit of thought around how customers interact with your products. Companies report that a single mention by Walt Mossberg can influence a product’s success dramatically. If you believe Seth Godin (and I believe I do), influencing the influencers has enormous impact on your product’s success in the marketplace. So, what are you doing to get people talking (and blogging) about you?