Who will be the first large company to allow open commenting and conversation about their products and services on their public site? For example, I go to levis.com or toyota.com and I can wax lyrical about latest offerings with fellow interested folk.
What’s the drive quality of this car model really like? How many miles per gallon are current owners getting? Should I opt for the 1.8 or 2.0 engine? What’s it like compared to the Ford?
This site level open community feels inevitable. Currently, every website already has a latent community. All the people across the globe who are viewing the same stuff at the same time, often with the same questions. There is already a trend towards exposing these communities. Friend Connect, Facebook Connect and services like Get Satisfaction are already allowing customers and potential customers to not only converse with each other, but also with the businesses themselves. Wal-Mart already allows customers to publicly rate their wares.
By exposing these latent communities and allowing them to converse, businesses get:
- Fantastic insight into their customers perceptions and expectations of their current offerings, and also that of their competitors (as people often compare when trying to make purchase decisions).
- An opportunity to be involved in the conversation and correct inaccuracies.
- A rich body of data about consumer trends to influence what they should do next.
I’m sure businesses would be worried about too many negative conversations, but if that’s the case, their problems are far greater than any website conversation. Certainly many people are more motivated to comment when something bad happens (as they say “good design is invisible”), as a way to get their grievances off their chest, but I can see a world where brand advocates are just as motivated to get involved and stand up for a product/service that they believe in. That is also what happens on review sites like Yelp, where people are equally motivated to recommend or criticise something.
Is it inevitable that the company who don’t allow open conversation on their site are the company with something to hide?
Sidewiki has the potential to function like that, hasn’t it?
Hi Rose, Sidewiki could indeed host this conversation but I think it would be interesting to see the companies themselves embrace open communities on the web and host the conversation themselves. Hosting the conversation themselves is a huge opportunity to companies to learn how to improve their products and services as it gives them a direct line of communication with their customers, and it also allows them to track metrics and measure success.
side wiki like many post-it on the website type products have all had fairly poor results because the number of pages v comments is so disproportionate that coming across valuable content is like finding a needle in a haystack. You have to be able to persuade companies to embed the wiki on their site and be recognized for being so transparent. I think that businesses will jump on this- one if its first forced on them, ie the conversation is happening on top of their site wether they like it or not and then if they others are commended and praised for taking ownership of this conversation.