Demand Satisfaction!

You’ve all seen the “I Hate” Web sites out there, right? I Hate Microsoft, Wal-Mart Blows, I Hate Starbucks?

They’re all fun for, like, ten seconds. Once you realize that their cries for retail justice are essentially occurring in a vacuum, with no engagement or even acknowledgement by the companies being hated, you move on. Boring.

Complaint sites are similar. They also try to harness the ire of customers to make companies step up and take notice, but, again, what company representative would dare step foot in an atmosphere like that? It’s a veritable digital lynching waiting to happen. Obviously, we’re trying to find a middle ground here at Get Satisfaction, a place where both companies and customers feel comfortable expressing their love, hate, and everything in between.

But, I confess: That unadulterated hate does catch my attention sometimes.

I was recently clued into a great example of a scrappy upstart using the power of hate in a very novel and smart way. Less Accounting, a company that offers a dead-simple accounting Web application, has created a mini-site that simply consists of a stream of Twitter tweets about Quickbooks. It’s called We All Hate Quickbooks.

Notice this Web site’s name. As is the case with most well-thought-out matters of presentation, the framing is important. It’s not the angry “I” of typical company-hate sites, nor is it the royal “we” which pretends to speak for everyone. It’s we, as in “we the people” who broadcast our thoughts and feelings on Twitter. Less Accounting has put themselves a bit on the sidelines (alongside the viewer) as we all watch the tweet-stream flow by. As they say: “We’re showing the good with the bad, so decide for yourself!”

Brilliant idea, and cleverly executed. They’re not creating any of this content. It exists somewhere on the Internet. It’s simply what people are talking about: good, bad, what have you. They’re just aggregating it. We do something similar with our Overheard feature, which allows you to see what people are saying about your company on Twitter.

The target of this piece of marketing cleverness is Intuit, the maker of Quickbooks. Intuit has long had a vocal minority of customers who haven’t been happy with all aspects of Quickbooks; for example, Mac users. For many years, Intuit has been slow to update the Mac version of its software. Sometimes, a year or more has gone by before new features that were written for the Windows version finally show up in the Mac version. Sometimes, they never show up in the Mac version. Those disaffected customers are exactly the type of people Less Accounting wants to appeal to, and I applaud their approach. It’s scrappy and smart and, well, even a little bit fun. (One quick glance at the site, and you quickly see that the rivalry they’re setting up is more of a playful one.)

But, watch out Less Accounting. Intuit probably has someone who also monitors Twitter and the Internet for mention of Intuit’s many products and services. One of them may have even just signed up to represent Intuit on Get Satisfaction, like, yesterday.

Competition is good, yes? Let’s keep it friendly, you scrappy accountants.

[Intuit and Less Everything are both on Get Satisfaction.]