Microsoft got innovative yesterday — and everyone showed up to see it.
Microsoft Live Labs, the group of folks who work intently at creating innovative Internet products for Microsoft, released Photosynth, the amazingly cool service that lets you take a stack of photos of a place and turn it into a 3-D model you can explore virtually. It’s almost sci-fi stuff, and nearly everyone is enthusiastic about its potential.
The downside of all this potential and popularity is that the Live Labs servers were overwhelmed yesterday after the initial release of Photosynth. So much so that they temporarily had to turn things off for awhile.
We were proud to be part of the Photosynth launch, helping them deal swiftly and effectively with their outage, as well as the myriad of customer questions, problems and product feedback. The Live Labs folks integrated Get Satisfaction directly into their site as their official channel for engaging with customers. They used it to provide ongoing updates about their outage.
During the course of the day, over 14,000 people visited the Live Labs Get Satisfaction section and added 87 topics. If Live Labs had used a traditional e-mail or trouble-ticket-based service, this traffic would have translated into many hundreds or thousands of separate messages, mostly duplicates. With Get Satisfaction their customers quickly got help and shared feedback in the public community, avoiding redundant private communication.
If you haven’t seen it yet, there’s an excellent video (embedded below) from the TED conference that is a great introduction to Photosynth. Plus, Walt Mossberg wrote a good review of Photosynth that is definitely worth checking out.
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.
We’ve added a simple (but very handy) new feature — shortened URLs.
Want to send a link to a Get Satisfaction topic to someone — but don’t want it to be massively long and wrap across multiple lines? Want to insert a shorter URL into a reply you’re composing? Can’t be bothered to copy it to your clipboard? Don’t sweat it. We’ve got you covered in all of these situations.
Just click on “Get a short URL” from the Share tab.
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.
Computers are complicated. So is software. User interface glitches, buttons that don’t work, menus that are misleading — all of that is hard to explain with mere words when you are trying to get help from a company. Sometimes, it’s just easier to show them what you’re seeing on your screen. It’s easier for both customers and company employees. Win-win, as they say. So we’ve added image upload.
It’s pretty straightforward. When you’re posting a topic or reply, just click on “Add an image” and upload what you got to show. We’ll upload it and insert the image in-line in your topic or reply. You can also insert an image URL and point to an image that already exists somewhere online if that’s what you prefer. It’s a feature we’ve wanted to add for awhile, and we’re happy to say that it’s now ready to go.
If you’re a Mac user and want to improve the way you take screen shots — and annotate them — you have to try out Skitch. It’s pretty awesome. We’re all big fans of it in the Get Satisfaction office, and we use it every day to share thoughts, ideas, and detail what we’re seeing on our computers. Five minutes with this application, and you’ll quickly see how it can benefit you, even without digging into the advanced features.
Skitch or no Skitch, we hope that having the ability to show everyone else what you’re seeing will make using Get Satisfaction easier and more efficient.
Join us here as we chat about customer communities, the benefits of transparency, principles of hospitality, and what we're doing with Get Satisfaction.
You can also contact us anytime at info@getsatisfaction.com or, if you'd prefer, call our CEO, Thor, at 415.205.0115, or our President, Lane, at 415.867.1708. We'd love to hear from you.
