If you’ve posted a cry for help at Twitter or Flickr, you’ve encountered Get Satisfaction, a customer support community. It works like this: Become a user, post your question, and other users as well as employees will post answers.
I’ve scanned these communities for answers before, but had never posted my own question until recently, regarding Rememble (more on that cool site later). In addition to a title, photo, and tags, users are asked how their issue makes them feel, and are presented with four face icons and a text box.
How does expressing your feelings outright change the way you’ll interact with a community? Selecting a face with a tongue did make my question (about updating my Rememble account through Twitter and Flickr, incidentally) feel trite, a feeling especially heightened when you notice that all the default user avatars are desserts. The effect can be a bunch of grumpy cupcakes. But I was also pleased just to have been asked about myself. It’s the “how are you” of retail–a question you like being asked just for the asking.
These communities can be helpful, but only if they’re watched over by alert employees and the users are prompted with relevant tags. Otherwise, it can become a bit of a mess of emotions and information.
I scrolled through the Whole Foods profile for examples, trolling for interesting questions in the Recently Active Topics list. This is one of the major flaws of this system–you’re led to look at recent topics, not the most relevant, but they’re often just one person complaining about chicken salad being unavailable. Users also frequently post the same question with different titles and tags, which can make a recurring problem seem isolated. I did find someone asking how and where 365 Soy Milk is made, complete with an illuminating response from an employee. That was interesting information because I drink that product. But I had to thrash around in the weeds to get there.
With 1,253 Whole Foods customers on the account, there’s quality peer information to be had, but you have to know how to get at it. Additionally, the profiles aren’t complete enough to see who you’re dealing with. See for example the post I found a bug in my Anutra, which spun into allegations that the owners of competing companies were slandering each others’ products and posting on the Whole Foods community posing as customers. So many cupcakes! Phew! Who is a reader to trust?
One exit thought: As collaborative storytelling evolves, will expressing your feelings become a way of interacting with the story? This plot twist makes me feel sad, etc. Sounds like an online book club that I’d be happy to try out, as long as my reading community excluded cupcakes.
Tags: ideas about communication, ideas about the future of media, ideas about the internet