Rock stars crave an in-depth feature in Rolling Stone. Debutantes pine for a profile in Vanity Fair. Hipster crafters hope in their heart of hearts for a quarter-page in ReadyMade.
From where we’re sitting, being written about in “the newspaper of record†— The New York Times — is pretty big. We’re thrilled to report that they’ve just published a business story about Get Satisfaction and our unique take on helping people get answers to their customer service quandaries.
The story is partly about complaint-oriented Web sites. Sites like Complaints.com and PlanetFeedback are vying to take pent-up customer anger and turn it into an ad-supported forum for, well, customer anger. We believe that the value in that kind of conversation goes only one way, and the negatives rarely really get turned into positives. Indeed, the point of true “complaint sites” may simply be to get unhappy consumers to sound off for the sake of sounding off.
We, by contrast, believe that encouraging authentic, two-way conversations between customers and companies is the only effective way to create a place where stuff gets done. It’s gratifying to see our idea of a “Switzerland for companies and customers” broadcast out into the world from such a respected name in publishing.
The article describes our business model in a way that may be confusing to some of our users. It says that our goal is “to persuade companies to buy the software it has developed.” To some this may seem like the same thing as our real model — providing fee-based services and tools on top of our current free Web services — but we see them as different animals. Stay tuned for more details on premium services.
In the second half of the article, the Times describes the real and sustained business advantages that companies like Timbuk2 have realized by adopting Get Satisfaction. As Patti Roll put it: “There were a lot of conversations going on outside of Timbuk2, on student blogs and other sites. Get Satisfaction is a way for us to aggregate that into a format that’s easy to utilize.”
We’ll certainly be picking up a few extra copies at the news stand. Look for that one in the mail soon, moms of Get Satisfaction.
Read all about it here.
[The New York Times is on Get Satisfaction.]
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