Every once in a while, I read a blog post that really gets it right. When that happens, I feel compelled to share it with people. I don’t do that very often because I hate blogs that do nothing but point people to other blogs. But, this one is worth it. [Full disclosure: We're mentioned, but that's not why you should read it.]

It’s about community management, and it’s one of those “10 Things” blog posts. But, it’s not the typical Digg-friendly titled list of obvious truths. It’s from Next New Networks, and it’s a compilation of a list that came out of a workshop they did with Micki Krimmel. If you’re interested in community management, I suggest you give it a quick read.

My favorite line: “People put something on their blogs because it says something about them, not because they want to promote a product they like. Think about that one for a while.”

I’m still thinking about that one. Thanks for making me think.

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.]

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.

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.

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.]

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?).

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.

Dopplr hired a new community design manager, Celia. I know because I read their blog, which is a marvel of beauty and simplicity. Okay, that’s saying a lot for a blog, but it really is nicely done.

As she puts it in her first blog post for the company, her job is to “talk to the people out there who are using Dopplr, find out what’s working and what’s not, and help the development team improve things accordingly.”

Hey, that sounds familiar. That’s kind of what I do, too. Welcome to the neighborhood, Celia.

To get that feedback, she’s trying something that others have had success with in the past: soliciting advice and comments from customers via Get Satisfaction. She’s asked for input about the redesign of the Dopplr Manage Connections page.

One of the most successful examples of a company soliciting that kind of product advice on our site has been Timbuk2. They used Get Satisfaction to ask their customers to help them design a new bag.

And, boy, did they respond. Ninety-three replies later, someone had this to say:

“I’m really bummed that I didn’t see this forum earlier. I travel a LOT (>150k miles/yr) and have a large collection of bags (bit of a bagophile). I have a large collection of Timbuk2 (a laptop briefcase, messenger bags in all sizes (some doubles), accessories, and I just got a Wool Commute bag that I haven’t used yet!). I also have a large collection of Tumi (20″, 22″, 22″ expandable, 24″, trifold suit bag, bifold suit bag, rolling large suit bag). I know the design phase is over, but I’d be thrilled to give my $0.02 worth on whatever design has been arrived at.”

That was the most recent person to add to this call for ideas — which began five months ago! Sounds like Timbuk2 has found at least one superfan who’s willing to give very valuable, very free advice. Well, almost free.

I bet there are a number of you out there who have very sincere, very valuable ideas about the way Dopplr presents itself to you. You can let them know what you think about it here.

[Dopplr and Timbuk2 are on Get Satisfaction.]

___

P.s. And, if you haven’t yet seen Mahalo Daily’s faux-infomercial about Dopplr, take two minutes out of your day to enjoy it:

P.p.s. [Mahalo is also on Get Satisfaction.]

All praise Get Satisfaction users who go above and beyond!

Twitter, which a lot of people are in love with (including me), has had a spate of service interruptions lately. This has led to a lot of frustration for many people (including me).

The Twitter evangelists among us (Twitterati?) believe that the people who don’t appreciate Twitter — those who poo-poo the idea of instant-message shout-outs and poetic epiphanies of 140 characters or less — just don’t get it. Maybe they never will, and who knows how Twitter will grow and scale, or if anyone should even care if everyone else “gets it”. For now, it is fun for those who love it, but even the Twitter faithful get unhappy when their friends don’t get their tweets.

This week, that unhappiness led to one of the most followed conversations on Get Satisfaction. After hearing about the many reports of undelivered tweets, Twitter employees worked on the problem, and most of the bugs seem to have been worked out.

But one of the less followed conversations this week was a very useful breakdown of the many commands you can use with Twitter. Thanks go out to Crystal from Twitter for posting this information, as it’s something many people have asked for in the past.

Today, a Get Satisfaction Twitter hacker (Tweeker?) saw Crystal’s list and decided to make — and share — a pocket-sized version you can download, with some of the most handy Twitter commands.

Great job, jted! You’re the kind of Get Satisfaction user that makes us stand up and take notice.

I’m printing mine out right now.

[Twitter is on Get Satisfaction.]

It’s helpful to remember that destroying the reputations of others has long been a popular blood sport. In the 18th century, for instance, Thomas Jefferson funded hack journalist James Callendar to smear his political enemies by publishing scandalous accusations–and Callendar later turned the tables by libeling Jefferson with the Sally Hemmings affair.

Still, there seems to be something qualitatively different about the nature of reputation online, and something tricky about preserving it.

One company, ReputationDefender, is basing their entire business around this idea. The Chronicle quotes their co-founder as seeing “online smear campaigns” everywhere:

“It is happening … on more or less every Web site where people can create content…From underage people, to university people, to graduate school people, to older people, to people who are being targeted by exes, to people who are being targeted by ex-business partners, colleagues at work.”

ReputationDefender’s service includes a reputation monitoring service, and as they put it, “if we find an item of online content you don’t like, we’ll carry out our proprietary DESTROY process for you on that item.” This reminds me of those “credit doctors” that claim they can zap negative items from credit reports. Sure this might be useful if there’s something bogus and destructive posted against you, but it’s not a strategy for developing a positive reputation, or even offsetting unflattering content. As we’ve seen, the “search and destroy” approach to “protecting” reputation is dicey at best. Besides being difficult to pull off, used broadly it can have a chilling effect on the very free speech that makes the Web useful. Oh, and then there’s the Streisand Effect.

I’d like to propose a different approach. Like cultivating a good credit record, building reputation is done steadily, over time. We need to embrace the messiness of social interactions online that we expect here in the real world, while adapting to its sometimes loony terrain. The first thing to do is reject the notion of online reputation as being a linear score– i.e. how eBay does it with its five star system (an aproach known for being gameable). Reputation in the real world is a mosaic of strengths and weaknesses, an interweave of stories, relationships and work product. We don’t expect flawlessness of people or organizations. That’s why every recruiter’s favorite question is “what is your greatest weakness?”; a non-answer is the only wrong answer.

With this in mind, here are five ways to cultivate reputation online.

1. Cast a long shadow

Often a single cruel review, blog post or forum thread can achieve a crushing visibility in search results. This is a rude awakening for many who don’t already have much of a presence online. Those ten links on the first Google results page can make or break reputations, and it’s negligent to relinquish this control entirely to the fates. With a tweezerful of effort you can exert a big influence on your search results.

The answer to creating a productive reputation lies in increasing online visibility, not minimizing it as some privacy advocates suggest. The answer is to create a bigger Web footprint for yourself, be verbose and connect promiscuously. Dish out meaningful content, ideally on numerous sites, and link to it. You’ll push any unflattering stuff off the front page, or at least dramatically dilute its impact.

For all the talk of Sue Scheff’s massive jury verdict, her online reputation was improved most visibly by her frequent postings to third-party blogs and her press coverage (which she links to from her eponymous Web site to increase their search value).

To quote Clive Thompson in the See-through CEO (Wired, 15.04):

“One bad blog post can kill you. But if you’ve got hundreds or thousands of sites linking to you and commenting on you, the law of averages takes over, and odds are the opinion will be accurate: The cranks will be outweighed by cooler heads…The Net rewards the transparent.”

2. Tell your side of the story

It’s amazing how often people let spurious charges go unanswered in a public forum. It seems that most people and organizations have two modes online, silent or litigious. There’s another approach: responsiveness. The trick is to not respond in a reactionary style, which can create a destructive blowback effect, but rather in the measured and calming tone of someone who is better informed. Your job is to correct facts, provide the missing context, clarify the intentions. It’s important to respond immediately, of course, before the hit piece sinks in. But again, more than anything you must demonstrate more reason and calm than your critics. Bonus points for being sympathetic to the “misunderstanding” that led to the overblown attack. It may not be as cathartic as unleashing your anger upon them, but it wins over the casual observer every time.

Barak Obama observed this approach in January when a conservative magazine (and then Fox News) accused him of having been educated in a madrassah, a radial islamic school. This turned out to be untrue, but Obama responded while maintaining the high ground:

“I think they recognize that the notion that me going to school in Indonesia for two years at a public school there at the age of 7 and 8 is probably not going to be endangering in some way the people of America,” Obama said on NBC’s “Today” show…The push-back was a signal Obama would fight to protect his reputation in the presidential campaign.

The untruth was handily dispatched and has not dogged him sense, thanks in part to his direct and measured response.

3. Give a heartfelt apology

This is the most obvious point here, but it may be the hardest to observe for many people. If you’ve done something that upset someone else then the absolute best way to defuse the situation, and actually enhance your reputation, is a strong dose of humility and a sincere apology. I’ve written about this a lot on this blog, but it bears repeating.

It’s a truism in business that a problem handled well does more to create a satisfied customer than if there is no problem at all. The same may be true of personal reputation. Witness Richard Edelman, whose PR agency was caught creating “flogs” for WalMart:

He apologized on his own blog, apologized some more, and began posting his own responses on blogs that were attacking him. He was wildly promiscuous, personally putting the message out anywhere he could, in what became a largely successful attempt to swamp the Google bots and prevent the critique from metastasizing. (The See-Through CEO)

4. Assemble an army
When you’re being picked on by others one of the best outcomes is that your admirers come to your defense. That’s exactly what happened to Draper Richards venture capitalist Howard Hartenbaum this week. On TheFunded.com, a site designed for entrepreneurs to rate and review venture capitalists, Hartenbaum was brutally critiqued by two founders whose idea he didn’t fund. Numerous fans of his tried to jump to his defense but were turned away with the site claiming they were trying to defend against the gaming of the system. Only after Hartenbaum’s murmur of support became a roar on other sites like VentureBeat did TheFunded relent and allow his defenders to have a voice on its site.

The point is that Hartenbaum’s army not only came to his defense, they rallied as a vocal group to change another site’s policy on his behalf. He wouldn’t have been able to do this alone, but his army gave his reputation a double-shot of resilience–a direct counter to the critics and an impressive show of force.

5. Stand for something

Reputation isn’t about being perfect, or about living up to any pre-existing measure. I’d argue that more than anything it’s about embodying a clear mission, a distinct talent or focus. It’s about showing sustained commitment to an organizing principle over time. An eBay powerseller might reply that reliability and honesty are universal attributes of reputation, and this is true. But without a mission or a higher purpose those elements don’t add up to much. With a commitment to excellence in a core area, though, people will cut you a lot of slack elsewhere.

Tara Hunt, for example, started blogging about her passion for community marketing a few years ago, and has since made a name for herself as an advocate for customers. She’s tireless and focused in her efforts. Though she sometimes ruffles feathers with her candor, she is now an internationally sought after speaker and has a book deal in the works. Her clear sense of purpose has helped inoculate her against the petty lashings of her critics. It doesn’t hurt that she retains her humility through it all.

People are typically generous towards others who demonstrate a willingness to take risks, make mistakes, and even fail. On the other hand, a history of poor character is not so easily forgotten. There’s justice in this structure. Good people get the slack they deserve, while the the bad guys are cooked in their own juices.

It’s true that these five points in principle aren’t much different than the sort of things we do to build reputation offline. That’s the point, after all. All we’re really doing is wrapping up our age-old human foibles in HTML.