April 18, 2008

OAuth Hackathon

Get Satisfaction is organizing a meet-up — next Saturday — to help app developers wrap their heads around and implement the OAuth protocol. If you haven’t heard of it, OAuth is how users can give access to their information on one application on a second app without sharing all of their identity. If you’ve ever used an app that requested permission to access your Flickr account you know what it’s all about. Get Satisfaction is excited to provide OAuth support in its API.

Maybe you’ll be fired up about OAuth after attending the Web 2.0 conference next week. Maybe you’ve been meaning to figure out OAuth for awhile now. Maybe you started an OAuth project but didn’t get very far. Either way you should join us.

Here are some reasons to add OAuth to your app:

  • You want to link to a third-party app (like Get Satisfaction!) but you don’t want your users to have to create a wholly new account. With OAuth you can pass-through their credentials for a seamless, single sign-in experience
  • You want your app to be able to access user accounts on third-party OAuth-enabled apps. Use OAuth if you want to give users access to their existing Get Satisfaction accounts and functionality from within your app.
  • You want to give third-party developers the same benefits we mention above. It will increase your accessibility in the broader ecosystem of other apps.

Cameron will be emceeing this hackathon, from 2 p.m. - 8 p.m., next Saturday, April 26th, and there’ll be numerous OAuth experts on hand to help you make quick work of your implementation. Since we don’t have a massive office here at Get Satisfaction (you’d probably also get distracted by our Rock Band set-up), the folks at Six Apart have generously donated their space for this event.

You can RSVP and find out all the details here.

By Eric Suesz | Posted in open source, Tips and tricks, appearances, development, Satisfaction | Comments (0)
April 17, 2008

Web 2.0 Conference: We’re Speaking

Web 2.0 is next week. We will be there. You bet we will. In fact, we’ve got a bunch of speaking engagements lined up. Come visit us as we expound on these topics:

Start-up funding: Thor speaks in a workshop setting with Rob Hayes (First Round Capital), Jeff Clavier (Softtech VC), and Ted Rheingold (Dogster/Catster) about getting early funding for your start-up venture. The official title: Starting Up: Strategies for Financing & Growing Your Web 2.0 Startup. Topics will include financing, marketing, team, revenue models, and managing all the other hats every startup entrepreneur needs to wear. Start it up on Tuesday! 9 a.m. (Moscone West 2022)

Data portability: Leslie will be talking about user interface and data portability. In an as-yet-untitled roundtable, the focus will be on hopping from one social network to another. What can we do to make that easier? How should these kinds of interfaces be designed so that users can clearly understand how all this passing-through and jumping over works? Get on that UI on Wednesday! 10:50 a.m.

Community Management: Amy will be whispering into the ears of trolls. Not the kind that you may have read about in fairy-tale books, but the more destructive kind who try to disrupt, grief, and kill online communites. Come learn some strategies for dealing with that guy on your Web site who seems to have a wealth of time on his hands and a whole lot of ire to share with the world. Trolls on Wednesday! 1:30 - 2:20 p.m. [Note: This one is part of Web 2.0pen — a free event (you can register for a free pass).]

Customer Service: Thor and Lane’s Customer Service is the New Marketing presentation is for those folks who are into fanatical devotion. No, not the religious kind; the kind that people feel toward their favorite companies and products. If your organization needs to get religion and fix your customer service problems, get thee to a seat early for this one. Customer Care Thursday! 2:40 - 3:30 p.m.

OAuth: Scott’s The How of OAuth will get you up and running with OAuth. What is it? How does it work? How do you get started? Scott shows you why it’s not the big wrestling match you might think, provided you take a simple, measured, Zen-like approach. OAuth on Friday! 2:40 - 3:30 p.m.

… More Web 2.0 news as it happens.

By Eric Suesz | Posted in customer service, community, Tips and tricks, conferences, appearances, development | Comments (0)
April 11, 2008

The Great Twitter Business Experiment

twittertrack.png

Everywhere I turn, it’s Twitter this and Twitter that. That has been the case in my private life for some time, but now Twitter seems to be growing fast, and I’m seeing Twitter everywhere I look. And, I love it.

Businesses are, predictably, trying to figure out how to leverage the value of Twitter for the extended enterprise (or some such nonsense). Well, let me clue you into the “low-hanging fruit” when it comes to using Twitter for business purposes: It’s a stupendously easy way to find out what your customers are saying about your products. Just as you might use Get Satisfaction as a conduit for customer opinion and ideas, you can use Twitter to “track” keywords and eavesdrop on your customers. Just be ready to hear what they have to say.

Yesterday, ReadWriteWeb published an article about how to get going on that front, and I thought that our readers might want to check it out, if they haven’t already. If you’re an employee who cares what people say about your company, here’s your weekend assignment: Read this article, set yourself up a Twitter account, and start following the conversation.

You might find that everything you think you know about your customers is wrong. Or right. Bet you can’t wait to find out.

[Twitter is on Get Satisfaction.]

By Eric Suesz | Posted in company, customer service, Tips and tricks | Comments (2)
April 1, 2008

To Better Serve You

I hate boilerplate. You do, too. I know you do.

When you hear the phrase “your call is important to us” while you’re on hold, you sigh deep down inside like I do, don’t you?

I call this “to better serve you” language. It’s often double-speak or language that purports to serve the customer, but really serves the company. Enough with the fake professionalism. Stop ironing out all of the emotion. I’m dying for some reality-based customer service.

Not everyone is like me (thank God, right?), but I think most people have reached a point where their anger reaches critical levels as soon as they detect boilerplate language in a customer service interaction.

Today, I was thrilled to find that a Get Satisfaction user after my own heart has composed a very terse — but very effective — list of ways to respond to customers. It was his way of recommending that a company step up and answer questions that have been asked on our site, but not yet answered. To wit:

“It would be great to hear one of the following:

1. Oh my God, we’re so sorry. Didn’t realize the problem. Fixing immediately.
2. Yes, sorry about that. We’re aware of it, and it’s on our list of things to fix soon.
3. Yep, unfortunately, it’s a complex issue, and we’re not sure if we’ll be able to do anything about it.
4. We appreciate your situation, but this is the way we intended our product to work. And we don’t see that changing.
5. Go to hell, buddy.”

Nicely done, sir.

If you want to break out of the mold of canned responses, start with something this spirited — and straightforward — and mold it to fit your own company’s culture. You might want to massage that last one a bit (#5), although people like me love that last one the most. Then again, not everyone is like me (thank God, right?).

By Eric Suesz | Posted in entertainment, customer service, Tips and tricks, appearances | Comments (0)
March 3, 2008

Tuesday = Tacos

Attention taco lovers: Tuesday is your day.

Join us next Tuesday, March 11 — high noon — at SXSW, in Austin Texas.

We’ll be munching on (free!) breakfast tacos and talking about exactly what it is we’re up to at Get Satisfaction.

We’ll be right next to the convention center, and we have bona fide conversations for you to join:

* 12-12:30: Breakfast tacos! (Salsa!)

* 12:30-1:15pm: Get to Know Get Satisfaction: A Primer. All the ways companies are using Get Satisfaction to reinvent customer service and build community. We’ll have some current company users on hand to talk about their own experiences with Get Satisfaction.

* 1:30-2:15pm: The Secrets of Managing Customer Communities. The tough problems around community management — and the easy solutions. Our community management team talks about building and maintaining the Get Satisfaction community, with an eye toward helping your company get started building your own community.

* 2:30-3pm: Of OAuth and APIs: Integrating Get Satisfaction on Your Site. Your customers can hop from your site to ours. We tell you how. Specifically, we’ll cover OAuth, a new third-party protocol that makes it (relatively) easy to give your users instant access to Get Satisfaction without the need to create another account.

Come, listen, participate, and be part of the breakfast taco community.

PureVolume Ranch
323 E. 2nd Street
Austin, Texas 78701
Map it

You can RSVP right here.

Can’t wait to hear exactly which different types of tacos are on the menu? Contact lane [at] get satisfaction [dot] com.

By Eric Suesz | Posted in company, customer service, community, Tips and tricks, hospitality, conferences, appearances, Satisfaction, SXSW, tacos | Comments (2)
Close
E-mail It