Get Satisfaction Leads Among Idea Aggregators
Finding new ways to reach, engage with, and learn from customers is a cornerstone of Enterprise 2.0. The idea and suggestion management space is one slice of that effort, and in this series we'll review the major players in this space and look at what options your company has for participating in it. The idea and suggestion management space has essentially three types of vendor offerings (with some bleeding across categories).
This is a guest post by Tom Powell, who writes about innovative applications of customer co-design, outside innovation, and crowdsourcing at Co-Innovative.com.
Centralized Aggregators:
- Get Satisfaction
- SuggestionBox
- FeVote
- Featurelist
Anyone can start a product or company page on these sites to submit ideas, suggestions, or complaints, which are then voted up or down, Digg-style, and commented on. Companies pay for access to this data, more powerful features, and the ability to "claim" pages and register official employee moderators. Like review sites such as Epinions, conversation happens on these sites with or without you.
Tool Providers:
These systems provide similar functionality to that of the centralized aggregators listed above but are controlled and run by the companies themselves. They include features such as ratings (or up/down votes), moderation, the ability to limit the number of votes per user or the access of certain groups, time-limited contests, and automatic searching for duplicate idea submissions.
Integrated Innovation Management Suites:
The idea management portion of these suites generally have more robust capabilities, such as weighting the contributions of users according to expertise and trust, creating virtual currency systems, providing enterprise-class security, and customizing captured information. By integrating idea capturing and prioritization into a more robust and sophisticated system, companies can then evaluate the cost of ideas, put ideas through a formal review process, and track their performance from conception to execution.
So which aggregators should you be paying attention to? Which has the greatest reach? The strongest offering? The following rankings are based on estimates culled from Compete, Alexa, Quantcast, Google, Technorati, and the actual features offered in each.
Get Satisfaction
The big kahuna, with over a million unique visitors per month, Get Satisfaction is the most fully featured of the aggregators, and it allows for more flexibility in submission types and more nuanced engagement with customers than any of the others. Users can specify whether they have an idea, question, problem, or praise; and similar submissions are automatically displayed as the user types to avoid duplication.
As an added bonus for businesses, there are also numerous "Net Promoter" data-gathering widgets on company and product pages. Employees can register on the site and interact with customers, noting whether the status of a post is "Under review," "In progress," or "Resolved."
Get Satisfaction suggests a process by which companies can ramp up, too: first, by each company linking to its page on Get Satisfaction; then by putting a widget on its own support page; and finally by signing up for the API to keep customers on its website. Basic pricing starts at $149, which allows up to 10 moderators and 10,000 API calls per day.
An interesting example illustrates the power and pitfalls of this type of system: on Twitter's page, the top-rated idea is for a "Flag as spam" feature, which was posted 11 months ago. An employee then started an official thread asking "How would you prefer to report Twitter spam?" However, Twitter still does not have any spam-flagging capability, and officially it is still, 11 months later, collecting feedback after having received 215 replies. Yes, Twitter still has occasional difficulties simply remaining up, so it is not terribly surprising that this has not yet been implemented.
Get Satisfaction stats:
- Recently hired a new CEO, Wendy Lea, and has raised $2.5 million.
- Claims 13,000 companies, 10,000 products and services, and 1.5 million monthly customers.
- Compete: 1.2 million visitors per month
- Alexa rank: 21,810
- Quantcast rank: 3,269
- Technorati: 4,342 blog reactions
- Incoming links according to Google: 2,000
SuggestionBox
Launched in open beta last year, SuggestionBox uses a five-lightbulb rating system, as opposed to up/down voting; otherwise, it overlaps with Get Satisfaction in a few areas. Users can choose to follow certain suggestions, companies can "claim" their pages, and companies can pass user suggestions through the API to SuggestionBox from their own sites. After signing up with SuggestionBox, companies have the ability to control which suggestions the public sees and to update the status of suggestions. Pricing is $49.50 per month for one suggestion box and one moderator.
SuggestionBox stats:
- Compete: Spiked last May with 30,000 unique visitors per month, but now has about 15,000 to 20,000 per month.
- Alexa rank: 189,345
- Quantcast and Google Trends: no data
- Technorati: 204 blog reactions
- Incoming links according to Google: 264
FeVote and Featurelist
FeVote and Featurelist have not gained traction. The sites are free but have only the most basic features. Anyone can start a suggestion board about basically anything, and widgets are available, but activity and traffic are non-existent. For example, despite having launched two years ago, FeVote has gathered a mere 12 suggestions and 21 votes for the iPhone in the last year.
Fevote stats:
- Compete: On a downward slope since March, to about 1,000 or 2,000 unique visitors per month now.
- Alexa rank: 907,850
- Technorati: 19 blog reactions
- Incoming links according to Google: 33
Featurelist stats:
- Compete: Fluctuating below 1,000 per month.
- Alexa rank: 1,423,469
- Technorati: 20 blog reactions
- Incoming links according to Google: 16
As it stands, Get Satisfaction has the most traffic, strongest engagement, and most robust functionality; and it allows companies the most flexibility in connecting with customers.
Hard questions remain, though. Should your business engage with these tools, and do they provide real value? Will they survive if companies increasingly bring these systems in-house? These are difficult, nebulous questions whose answers depend on your situation and your view on how these tools influence customer opinion and engagement.
Any company itching to dip its toes in this space should first monitor and engage in the conversations on Get Satisfaction and SuggestionBox. If you find you want greater control and want to carry the conversations on your own site, check back here for Part 2 for a look at what the tool vendors have to offer.
Tom Powell writes about innovative applications of customer co-design, outside innovation, and crowdsourcing at Co-Innovative.com. He is finishing his MBA in Product Management and Entrepreneurship at Duke University in North Carolina.
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great resource site.
menu design showcase: very useful stuff.
http://www.csshook.com/menudesign/
Thanks
Another great idea management application is called IdeaJam. You can see IdeaJam in action at http://ideajam.net.
Companies can run a hosted version of IdeaJam or can run it on their hardware behind the corporate firewall.
The link to IdeaJam in my comment above doesn't seem to work. It should be http://ideajam.net
You mention that basic pricing starts at $149 but just wanted to point out there's also a free version and a $49 dollar a month starter version.
The starter version allows you 1 moderator and 1,000 visitors a month.
Love the product, only wish they would allow for authentication based on source page accounts (i.e. people didn't need an account on get satisfaction AND on the web site they were making a suggestion for. Too high a barrier!)
https://getsatisfaction.com/qwobl/account/new/starter
It mind sounds very European, but Uservoice has just started its service in different languages such as French, German, Dutch and Spaish which is priceless for many European startups.
customergauge.com is great for ecommerce sites wanting to measure net promoter and customer feedback. It's automatic and simple to send results around the organisation.
Here is another solution your readers may be interested in. Many of the solutions as you mentioned only handle capturing the ideas, a few of them are full idea management solutions
http://acceptsoftware.com/products/accept-ideas.html
Thanks Tom, for compiling this information. We enjoy your focus, and appreciate your various blog contributions. One of our products that you might find to be of interest is http://www.dynamicalsoftware.com/cogenuity which is a challenge based collective intelligence app geared to help organizations tap the collective brainpower of those on the Internet to solve their compelling problems. Please add Cogenuity to your list to review.
From a different angle, what many people need is to engage their community through structured Q&A. Let them ask and answer the questions they want about the issues they have.
We're in limited beta right now and looking for good partners.
talk2us at yousaidit.com if you are interested.
GetSatisfaction "leads among idea aggregators"???! This is an incredibly poorly written & skewed analysis by Tom. What percentage of user-contributed suggestions on GetSatisfaction are actually new feature suggestions vs. complaints/rants against companies? Just because the feature exists among many features on the site doesn't mean that it is the *PRIMARY* use case!
Get some real data on use cases on GetSatisfaction, Tom, vs. being an obvious shill for their PR staff. GS is about bitching about companies, just take a look through the site for yourself. Prove me wrong.
@Bruce Elgort, Avery Otto, Charles Thanks for the pointers, I'll check those out.
@Christian You must have a specific offer, as their public, free offering doesn't include a moderator and their isn't a $49 offering. You are right to point out, however, that company sites can be operated and run for free (with official employees), which is essentially what happens when a company/product page is started by anyone.
@Michael Accept definitely looks like one to check out, it would likely fall under my 3rd category in the article of Innovation Management Suites.
Hey Tom --
This is great example of how poorly researched this article really is - GS is first & foremost a customer service replacement. Here's a link to the $49 plan that you told @Michael that GS did not have: https://getsatisfaction.com/companies/new/starter -- How did you miss this and be so confident about it?
On top of that, using Compete scores to say who's leading the Innovation pack is tangental reference at best. What about all of the ACTUAL innovation companies that offer their customers domain aliasing as part of a BRANDED solution (which GS is clearly not)? Compete doesn't track traffic to aliased domains.
On top of that, you throw out SuggestionBox, which incidentally laid off their entire staff, save the founder http://www.techcrunch.com/layoffs/ - The comment on their front page are all dated Oct. '08. They're a dead horse, not worth placing bets on.
Bloody useless Mr. Powell! Please step it up a couple notches next time around.
@Dino The $49 Starter package is only an option if you are a "very small company or organization" according to Get Satisfaction's blog so it is not available to everyone: http://blog.getsatisfaction.com/2008/11/11/our-new-get-satisfaction-starter-package-49/
Yes, Compete is simply an estimate of traffic which is why I included other measures to help get a general sense of popularity. Further, if I am understanding you correctly, I believe what you are referring to would fall under the 2nd and 3rd categories of idea/suggestion vendors. I narrowed the focus of this article to just the aggregators in this post, to centralized sites in which many companies and products are available and anyone can start a page for one. If this post had been about all innovation vendors, then using these measures would be incorrect as you say.
And, yes, SuggestionBox laid off most of their staff a few months ago, but they are still up and running and basically the only alternative in the space at the moment. All of this further supports the main thrust of the post, that Get Satisfaction leads in the narrowly defined space of centralized idea/suggestion aggregators.
Thanks for the feedback.
Tom,
Thanks for creating a general taxonomy around idea and innovation management solutions. This is only the beginning of a new market that could possibly become the next CRM.
I wanted to point out that Spigit is a purpose built enterprise tool to help decision makers quickly identify the best ideas, content, and contributors based on advanced analytics. Many of the most successful Fortune 10, 100 and 500 are using our products today.
Best, paul
Alexa rankings can't be the sole determinants of measuring a sites importance and popularity as the http://www.alexa.com/data/details/main/fortunehotels.in rankings do not take into account all the browser types like Windows Vista etc.
We'd also like to add another Authentic tool out there for customers to interact with companies: SiteRemark.com
Read more about it at: http://facollective.com/2009/04/24/siteremark/
It is much different than Get Satisfaction, but with some of the same goals in mind. Help companies interact with their customers more efficiently.
I think that help companies interact with customers more effectively
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