The Dangers of Online Feedback

Business Week has a very interesting book excerpt from "What Would Google Do?" (Jeff Jarvis), titled "Detroit Should Get Cracking on its Googlemobile", which caught my eye, in part, because I'm currently reading Tom Vanderbilt's "Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What it Says About Us)". Jarvis points out that at present auto manufacturers don't really communicate with their customers about what they would like, or allow them to customise their cars in any meaningful fashion. If they had, he argues, we would have had ways to interface our iPods with our car radios long ago. In the future, if they treated cars as a platform that allowed users to create their own cars, we might see unpainted cars being sold, then taken to local graffiti artists. All hail "open-source" (?!) cars, apparently, not to mention open-source urban planning.

That got me thinking. Many large corporations are today accused of not listening to their customers. Meanwhile many are trying to use the Internet to change that (take a look at Get Satisfaction). It used to be that to listen to your customers involved conducting telephone or paper surveys, or paying people to be in focus groups. Now you can just set-up an online forum, or blog about your ideas and see what comments come back. In many ways that's good: the cost of soliciting feedback is minimal, so even one-person startups can do it. The bad bit is that the company has to take the time to actually listen.

Whilst older companies have a reputation for not asking for feedback, it seems to me that the newer technology companies have a bad history of actually listening to feedback that concerns policy. That's distinct from feedback on software bugs, which are effectively win-win for the company and the consumer. Google, for example, is great at releasing its products in beta versions, and fixing them up in response to feedback. However, looking at the upset surrounding its retention of search logs, and it's the opposite. Similarly, Facebook's introduction of its Beacon technology, for publicising what purchases users had made, didn't really go down that well either, though they at least made the service an opt-in feature after about three weeks. (Any other examples?) The point is not that users aren't eventually listened to, but more that they're listened to quickly or completely only when the company considers it to be commercially sensible.

"So what?", you might ask, "Isn't that obvious?" Well, to a company, yes. Pandering to users whilst potentially cutting your revenue or effectiveness doesn't seem commercially sensible. But if consumers now expect this easy-feedback channel to be taken notice of, then when it's not, a revolt occurs. On the web, where the switching costs tend to be lower, customers might just decide to go elsewhere. Even with companies who produce more tangible products (cars, say), users can still make a fuss very publicly, and very quickly. Worse, they'll accuse the company of "not listening". Suddenly the feedback channel isn't so great any more. Particularly since a lot of that feedback is public for all the world to see.

So, as a small company, online feedback can be great for understanding how to shape something new. But it's perhaps important to manage users' expectations. Otherwise you might end up like Face Party, who closed shop for a while after users complained that they hadn't been given what they'd been promised. Moreover, dedicating time to making sure that the online feedback channel is tended to, so that you at least appear (!) as though you're listening will probably pay off.

Welcome to a brave new world, where goodwill is generated by listening, rather than another PR campaign. Oh, and where trying to fake reviews to gain goodwill will probably be discovered.