Collecting End User Feedback

The following article was taken from another one of the places on the web where I happen to share my thoughts from time to time.

I have decide to republish this here because I think it is a good example of how you can use social media and general population feedback to monitor the successes and failures of client projects.

It is important upon launch of any new product, marketing campaign etc to collect statistics and feedback. That’s the obvious. Why? Because it allows you to improve in the future by learning from what has been successful and what has failed in the past.

Don’t get me wrong statistics such as those provide by programs such as Google Analytics are without question important data to be collected. Yet good old fashion I hate it because… or I love it because… feedback is priceless.

Implementing some type of monitoring is something I like to encourage my clients to do. I also like to do so for myself. One so that I am able to help clients as well as field questions about user feedback. Two, because I see it as a good tool by which I can learn about the work I have done and thus improve in the future.

Enjoy the following article, I would love to hear your feedback in the comments.

The social web, services such as Twitter have made it so easy to collect this type of information that it seems sill to me not to take advantage of it.

The idea of ‘Social Media Monitoring’ is nothing new so I am not about to share with you anything ground breaking, but I will share with you a “real world experience” type story that demonstrates just how this social media monitoring can benefit your business.

For most of you Twitter is no secret, you have probably heard of it at the very least and I hope that a large number of you actually use it. (If not shoot me an email and we can talk). So for those of you that use it you know of that little thing called Twitter search. Now without going into hash tags and so on we will jut have a quick look at the basic Twitter Search.

Let’s say for some reason I wanted to keep tabs on what people are saying about Nike. I head on over to Twitter.com, I log in and in the upper right I type the word Nike into the search box. Search does it’s thing and returns real time results for tweets referencing the word Nike. Sweet!

Now for me, I use Tweetdeck, in fact I have it open around 15 to 24hrs a day (yes somewhat geeky you might say). Now with Tweetdeck I can organize my twitter feed into columns. Let’s see right now I have All Friends, friends I categorize under “Design”, my @ replies, DM’s and last but not least a column for search.

That’s the one I need to get to here. So a few weeks ago I launched a pretty large and involved site for a client (by involved I mean lots of moving parts so we launched in “Beta” so to speak because we wanted some time to iron out any bugs). Couple of quick notes:

1. With the launch he did a bit of publicity so we expected some traffic right off the bat meaning we couldn’t really hide behind that “we haven’t been found yet” period in hopes to work out the kinks.
2. With the site there is also a few informational products, one of which would also get some publicity behind it.

What Am I Looking For In These Searches

Ok, so on launch I fired up a search for the domain in my last column of Tweetdeck to monitor what people where saying. It’s not foolproof and probably will not catch every muttering but it will catch a good number. Now sure I see someone say “awesome design” or “well put together” and it gives me a bit of an ego boost, but more importantly I can keep tabs on a few very key things.

1. The overall reaction to the product.
2. Someone experiences a problem, they are an active twitter user, more than likely they are going to tweet about it!
3. Someone has a feature idea I can take note. (Now I am of the mindset that first of all you can’t please everyone down to the detail and secondly you should not run off and make every change you see, but if those request start to pile up it is definitely worth having a look at. Sometimes, an idea is so smart it makes you say damn, I should have thought of that in the first place.
4. This allows me to get an outsiders view of the product. Let’s be honest working day in and day out on something you may overlook an obvious detail. The most important thing is those outsiders, your product end users, so it is good to hear what they have to say.

Real Life Examples

Here are a few things that actually happened through my monitor this particular site.

1. A feature idea was tweeted that will more than likely make it’s way into phase 3 of the site.
2. A bug, error, misjudgment what ever you want to call it was tweeted, I caught the tweet and had it fixed in minutes.
3. A consumer in another country wanted to purchase one of the informational products but could not because we had overlooked the country code on the order form. Now this one is really neat. First I fixed it, then I let the site owner know of the request. The site owner happens to have a twitter account for the site specifically so he DM’ed the original tweeter and let him know that he could now purchase the eBook. How’s that for paying attention to your “customers” needs.

Really what this is about is getting customer feedback in it’s rawest form and without really having to do much leg work to do so. Nobody here knows that I am keeping tabs on what they are saying about the site but you can be sure that their opinions (good and bad) are valued and looked at.

Are you taking advantage of social media to keep tabs on what your clients and customers/end users are saying about your product?