Even New Media Companies Should Listen to their Evangelists/Apostles First

 
Strangely, Customer Satisfaction Research Among Super Users is Missing from Major Social Networks like LinkedIn, Facebook, and MySpace…
My last post was about Facebook finally listening to what its users think. I think all the major social networks have been doing an extremely poor job in doing this. The 80/20 rule is totally ignored. I can […]

Strangely, Customer Satisfaction Research Among Super Users is Missing from Major Social Networks like LinkedIn, Facebook, and MySpace…

My last post was about Facebook finally listening to what its users think. I think all the major social networks have been doing an extremely poor job in doing this. The 80/20 rule is totally ignored. I can understand this to some degree, because revenues don’t necessarily come from the heaviest users. However, the heaviest users are of course, to use some Guy Kawasaki terms, the best Evangelists for the respective networks, and not listening to them is Bull-Shitake!

Case in point, I’m a member of a by-invite only group on LinkedIn called “Super Group Founders“. This group founded and managed by Richard Chaplin is only for owners of the 1% of LinkedIn groups with 1,000+ members. According to Richard “If genius is the ability to recognize relationships before they are seen by others and to nurture them to maturity, Super Group owners must be visionaries, recognized experts and gatekeepers to their community.” and the group is intended to help an elite set of 700+ entrepreneurial gatekeepers achieve their audacious goals through sharing knowledge, networking and working with LinkedIn.

One of the threads I’ve started on this board is dedicated to bugs which we as super users find. One annoying bug for the past week has been that posts over the 10th in a thread are not showing up. A couple of us have complained to LinkedIn CS, but no word yet. You would think LinkedIn could have someone actively participating in the discussion on this type of board. It’s not Rocket Science to listen to what your apostles have to say, is it?

Again, I point to an excellent example of how to manage CGM of your heaviest users, Flyertalk.com. Here Starwood Hotels has a full time employee, William Sanders aka. “The Starwood Lurker” dedicated to responding to important issues raised by road warriors on the board. The effort is very much appreciated by the users. And Starwood therefore is a frequent recipient of the Freddie Awards.

While I’m not surprised many large companies haven’t figured out some of the basics on how to handle CGM yet, you would think that those who clearly operate only in this space would be a little better at it than companies in other spaces like Unilever etc. Well, I’m sure those who master these skills sooner than others will have a distinct advantage. Will be interesting to see which companies they are.

PS.

For those interested there is a white paper of some of the findings from our work on Flyertalk.com or on Unilever’s Campaign For Real Beauty/Pro-Age discussion boards, please see the case study and/or white paper section of the Anderson Analytics website.

Also, for those interested, I will be speaking about among other  things, how to learn from Consumer Generated Media (CGM) at the Freddie Awards/FTMA (Frequent Travel Marketing Association) in Ft. Lauderdale this April 22-24.

Link to original postTom H. C. Anderson – Anderson Analytics