How Satisfying is Get Satisfaction?
Posted by drlumbers on June 19, 2008
As a newcomer to social media, I’m acquainting myself with its various tools. With this in mind, I stumbled upon Getsatisfaction.com the other day.
It’s a free, user-friendly, uncluttered service that provides an open forum for interaction between companies, employees and customers. The ordinary visitor can pose questions to a company representative, file complaints or start a new discussion about a company of their choice. The site’s features are easy to follow and use, as is the registration process. Get Satisfaction is an excellent illustration of how the explosion of social media has created both the opportunity for, and threat of, free flowing discussion.
That being said, it’s difficult to render a definitive verdict on the site; it’s a work in progress.
It’s evident some companies have eagerly jumped on this bandwagon, while others have either resisted or remain oblivious to it. An example of the former is Twitter, a social networking service. It’s one of the site’s most active companies; there are currently over 2,400 topics for discussion, with 15 of Twitter’s employees or representatives participating in the forum. The discussion consists mostly of questions or complaints raised by customers. Twitter obviously sees the site as a chance to build and sustain relationships with its public, not only by consistently answering queries (customers generally rate the responses as useful) but by proactively providing information (the CEO recently used the site to announce that Twitter’s IM services were being temporarily shut down).
FedEx, on the other hand, is virtually non-existent on Get Satisfaction. It has hitherto opted not to assign a representative to the space. This doesn’t mean that FedEx is inattentive to its customers or an inept public relations practitioner; it consistently ranks as one of the most reputable companies in North America. Perhaps there isn’t the same need for an established business (and many of whose customers aren’t tech savvy) to engage in this type of forum as there is for Twitter.
Get Satisfaction has the potential to serve as an empowering tool for consumers (getting their voices heard) and for smaller businesses (disseminating messages to large audiences at no cost). The site’s (and those to follow) influence is likely to expand in proportion to customers’ demand for knowledge and participation in the market-place. Corporations need to be mindful of this.
It also seems certain, however, that reputation will continue to be determined by the old fashioned ability to deliver quality products and connect emotionally with targeted audiences.
Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose.
