One of the great features of the Web 2.0 movement, is the desire of companies to listen and respond to feedback in the blogosphere and from customers in general. Most of the successful Web 2.0 companies are participating in this conversation. Most of the unsuccessful Web 2.0 companies are not participating in this conversation.
The Good
A prime example is FeedBurner. FeedBurner is a great service, but like anything built using software, it's got bugs. Software bugs annoy customers, just as live bugs annoy campers. But when you speak up, FeedBurner usually responds immediately and tries to help their customer. It's a neat concept and a big reason why I'm such a FeedBurner fan.
Other Web 2.0 companies making this effort recently.
- Bloglines (Ask) - Bloglines engineers are commenting in blogs whenever Bloglines is criticized..
- Technorati - David Sifry interacts a lot with the blogosphere, but I have been disappointed that most bugs at Technorati never get fixed, or the fix only comes 12 months later.
- Microsoft - Robert Scoble engaged everybody. I have to wonder if he passed the baton or if Microsoft will revert to its past self.
- Google - Many Google engineers have blogs and they also participate actively in Google groups.
- Sorry if I missed you, but their are countless Web 2.0 companies making this effort and I wish I could name them all.
The Bad
OK other than Jeremy Zawodny, does any other Yahoo! employee answer customer emails? Over a month ago, I found that the KBCafe.com website became under-indexed by Yahoo! Not de-indexed, but almost all of my webpages were removed from their index. I sent a few emails to various Yahoo! support email addresses. I got one email back from Jeremy giving me the email address where I should best be sending my feedback. I sent them several more emails and they never acknowledged receiving any of them, never mind replying to them. So, I'm under-indexed by Yahoo! for unknown reasons and Yahoo! isn't interested in the conversation.
The Ugly
Worse, there's ExpoActive. This last week, I started the painful process of replacing all my ExpoActive ads with alternatives. Why? ExpoActive like FeedBurner has bugs, but when I blog about them or send them support emails, they never respond. At one point, I use to have one website in their top 10 publishers and another in the top 20 publishers. Having two of their top 20 publisher websites you would think they would answer support emails from me, or at least acknowledge my queries with an automated response. After countless support emails sent, I have never received a reply of any kind.
I think google is ahead of the curve..not only do they listen and interact..but when wrong..they try to do amends .. :)-
Remember kiby got a whole of goodies why checkout failed him..or the other dude which got asprin(?) shipped to him :)-
thats more then what most other companies do !!
/pd