Liberating Content from Facebook

The new Social Engagement Hub on Facebook will cost Get Satisfaction customers an additional $99 per month. As Get Satisfaction's co-founder Lane Becker told us yesterday, however, this expense could easily be worth it for these companies, as users on Facebook tend to be very active on these fan pages and really want to interact with these companies and brands on the social networking service.

As Lane also noted, conversations that happen around a brand in Facebook tend to be trapped in this silo. Thanks to the synchronization between the two platforms, however, brands can now take this content and make it useful outside of Facebook as well. Another problem for brands that Get Satisfaction is trying to solve here is the simple fact that conversations on Facebook only have a very short lifespan. Get Satsifaction now allows companies to capture these conversations.

Overall, this looks like a very smart way for brands to interact with their customers on Facebook and to streamline their social media customer service efforts.

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:

• SalesForce Ideas Management
• UserVoice
• IdeaScale
• Get Satisfaction
• Kindling

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:

• Imaginatik
• BrainBank
• SalesForce Ideas Management
• Brightidea
• Spigit

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.

Given this new functionality, it seems fair to compare MeasuredUp to Get Satisfaction and UserVoice, two services that we have written about extensively here at RWW. The folks at MeasuredUp, however, explained to us that they don't necessarily see these companies as direct competitors, as MeasuredUp focuses more on the customer service experience than feature requests or bug reports. MeasuredUp also puts a stronger emphasis on small and local businesses than Get Satisfaction.

The user interface on MeasuredUp is not quite as slick as Get Satisfaction's, but it does the trick.

One feature we especially like on MeasuredUp is the ability to upload videos together with the written reviews.

For companies, claiming their identity on the service is pretty easy, and MeasuredUp will contact them to make sure nobody is claiming somebody else's profile. Businesses can also add the MeasuredUp widget to their websites.

Judging from the success of Get Satisfaction, MeasuredUp is doing a smart thing by directly connecting businesses to their customers. There is already a very active community of consumers on MeasuredUp, and it is definitely in the best interested of any company listed on the site to reach out to them directly.

It is good to see a popular and useful service like Get Satisfaction move towards a viable business model, though the pricing for these premium services is probably a bit too high for individual developers. The Basic services will cost between $120 and $149 a month (the introductory price for this week is $99 for three months), while the Pro package starts at $349. For large companies, of course, this is a very small price to pay for satisfying their consumers, and those who don't want to pay can still stick with the free service, which has also been enhanced with a pared down version of the premium features.

Features

So what comes with the premium packages? The paid accounts come with a new Management View, which will allow companies to take full editorial control over their Get Satisfaction forums. This includes prioritized topic handling, monitoring and managing the activity of their employees on the service, advanced search functions, and additional filtering and sorting mechanisms. Companies will also be able to moderate topics and remove inappropriate content.

Those users who decide to stay with the free version will get access to a 'lite' version of the Management View.

Get Satisfaction already hosts forums about close to 7000 companies. Many of these will surely opt for the premium services - especially those that already have employees answering questions on Get Satisfaction anyway.

The API will allow companies to build services on top of the Get Satisfaction infrastructure. As president Lane Becker suggests, a company could recreate their Get Satisfaction area on their own site, or they could build widgets to expose their support channels to readers on the company blog, or the social networking profiles of employees. "Or create some clever visualizations that help you better understand what your customers are saying," writes Becker.

On the consumer end, the API could be used to create tools that make it easier for people to create and track discussions around companies and products. We think it might be interesting for someone to create a mashup that tracks which companies are the most talked about on the site, as well as the overall mood of each (i.e., which company has the most optimistic customers? the most frustrated?).

The Get Satisfaction crew has released Ruby and PHP libraries for the API, which are available on the new, Mashery-hosted developer site. The API also supports OAuth, a third party identification protocol that will make it easy for companies to integrate Get Satisfaction services into their existing user ID system by passing users into the Get Satisfaction system and automatically creating/linking accounts there.

In a blog post, Becker promised additional "API-related tricks ... in the coming weeks and months" from Get Satisfaction.