August 21, 2008
We’re not just Internet famous. We’re Apple famous. (Take that, fake Bigfoot.)
The folks at Apple called us up some months ago wanting to find out what we do and how we do it. They were looking for all-Mac organizations to profile on their Web site. How could we say no?
We’re definitely an all-Mac operation at Get Satisfaction. Everyone here drank the Apple Kool-Aid a long time ago. We all proudly sport Mac laptops, we all have iPhones, and we’ve developed everything at Get Satisfaction using Apple technology. It’s almost comical when a phone rings (or even vibrates) in our office. Everyone immediately reaches for their iPhone. I think we need to institute a mandatory “unique ringtone” policy. Seriously.
The Apple people came to our office a few times and interviewed each one of us and took a ton of pictures. (We hid the one PC laptop we keep around for testing purposes.) Sadly, they didn’t decide to use the picture of me looking all cool and casual with my feet up on my desk as the big, glossy face of Get Satisfaction. I think I squinted too much that day. The pictures they did include are quite good, and the words that accompany the pictures sound great to our ears.
Thanks, Apple, for including us on the business-facing section of your site as an example of a scrappy start-up full of people who live and breath Macs. We’re honored.
Read all about it right here.
July 25, 2008
This week, Twitter got a big boost in traffic to its Web site from an ABC News Story that showed how an everyday consumer got help from Comcast’s Frank Eliason on Twitter (we’ve written about similar things on this blog in the past). I’ve gone ahead and coined a silly phrase for this kind of outreach: “micro-service”. Thank me later.
All that mainstream-media-led traffic inevitably led to additional traffic to Get Satisfaction, and we were inundated with a wealth of people who had a lot to complain about, but who hadn’t ever used Twitter or Get Satisfaction before. Unexpected events like this are always a great way to see how well we’re framing our service. If they don’t get it, perhaps we aren’t explaining it well enough.
I’m seeing a lot of stories like this ABC News story popping up. Reporters are trying to find a way to write about Twitter, and they seem to want to frame the story in a particular way. More stories like these are surely coming, and most of them will probably be following up on the same Comcast/Twitter story that’s already been written by other, more astute journalists.
I wouldn’t mind seeing stories about Twitter that focus less on complaints. There’s so much more to Twitter. Tons more. When they frame the story as “how to complain and get a company’s attention” rather than “look at all this unexpected interestingness that comes out of new ways of communicating,” I don’t know that they’re accomplishing much — beyond prompting the big complainers to reach out and rant to someone.
Not that I’m complaining too loudly myself. They’re reporting on customer service. That’s a start. More please! I’m ready to direct the traffic.
April 29, 2008
Woo-hoo! We just got a write-up in Fast Company.
When you’re the one being written about, it’s easy to spot particular places in articles where you think journalists have gotten it wrong. You might say, “Well, that’s not exactly what I said,” or, “The author is just trying to spin this to fit the headline.” There’s a million ways to pick apart an article, and the only one who usually thinks they got it right is the one who wrote it.
But, everyone in the office seems to agree that Kermit Pattison did a really great job with this one. And we love the headline: “Does a New Website Hold the Secret to Great Customer Service?”
Give it a read.
March 4, 2008
Wal-Mart has been criticized for both sucking and blowing, but it looks like they may actually have a chance to polish their tarnished reputation.
After a number of years of dismal public relations blunders (in particular, an ill-fated PR-hatched Web site) Wal-Mart has finally figured out that people desire authentic experiences.
So, they’re letting their merchandising buyers blog about the products they come across. In fact, they’re actually encouraging them to speak their minds.
That’s a refreshing change of pace from a company that has continually refused to sell just about anything that might remotely offend anyone.
Will it work? Only time will tell, but — like any decent blog — it’s already started a few contentious arguments. There are already knee-jerk doubters accusing Wal-Mart’s PR firm of rigging the blog and an article in the New York Times lending credibility to the idea.
It’s tough to dig out from this kind of mess. I think that Wal-Mart’s reliance on short-term results over long-term reputation has put them in this spot. But, it’s nice to see them try to dig out.
[Wal-Mart and The New York Times are both on Get Satisfaction.]
February 25, 2008
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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