We have always had a standard for evaluating customer satisfaction, and that standard is: if the customers are happy, they are quiet. The goal has always been to keep as little conversations coming from your customers as possible, because more often than not, we only hear from the unhappy ones. The quality of the products is measured by the technical support calls at your call centers or the complain letters you recieve in your mailboxes: the less, the better. For a long time, corporations try real hard to control the communications flowing in only one direction, to make average products that function as expected, and to stay invisible and out of the conversations of the consumers. That mindset has worked for decades.
I think now is a good time to re-evaluate the standard, and you shouldn’t settle with silence anymore. The quality of your products should now be measured by the number of followers you have on Twitter, the number of fans you have on Facebook, or the number of blog posts your company inspires: the more, the better.
The challenge, however, is that people only choose to talk about certain things. There is a reason why Zappos has over half a million followers on Twitter and Payless doesn’t, or thousands of people choose to blog about iPhones over the Nokia E75. The hard question you need to ask about your business isn’t how to get people’s attention, instead, you should ask what it is that you make which is so intriguing, that I can’t help but to spend my time to write a blog post about you.
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