Nathan Gilliatt, writing in his Net-Savvy Executive blog reports on a recent case where Hasbro’s tracking of Amazon product reviews alerted them to a choking-danger from a popular toy. The product was swiftly withdrawn. The article observes that the level of monitoring required to stay across Amazon reviews is high, but that the intelligence can be vital.

Gilliatt comments that without RSS feeds from the review pages, monitoring Amazon reviews is hard. Hard, but not impossible. We monitor review sites like Amazon for a number of clients. The intelligence they offer on competitive strengths and weaknesses within a product area is hard to over-estimate. …