A while ago, I wrote about how you should use feedback to your advantage — particularly when it comes to running a website.  Without the person to person contact of a brick and mortar business, website owners will take all the feedback they can get.  The truth is, though, it’s incredibly hard to get good feedback online.

Where’s the feedback?

How hard is it to get meaningful feedback online?  I recently took a look through all of the feedback emails sent to Wikinvest

since I joined.  Without actually counting them, here’s the rough breakdown of emails in order of email “market share”:

1. Classes and Conference invitations
2. Complain letters to company executives (i.e., someone goes to the Honeywell page and writes a nasty feedback letter “to Honeywell” — only, Honeywell doesn’t get it, we do.)
3. Requests for link exchanges
4. Advertising / Partnership inquiries
5. Feedback of the Useless Variety (everything looks great!)
6. Feedback of the Useful Variety (complaints)

There’s no better feedback than complaints.  Of course, we all love the pat-on-the-back feedback email, but its’ the “what the hell’s wrong with you?  No one can read that font!” email that really gets us moving.  At Wikinvest, total feedback — both useless and useful — probably only equates to 5% of all emails to our feedback address.  To take a great example, today Wikinvest released a whole slew of new features, including a bit of press to go with it.  What sort of volume did we see in our feedback inbox?  We had five emails — despite the fact that traffic today was multiples higher than a typical day.

Despite the huge Get Satisfaction Feedback buttons that have been popping up all over the web, it seems like most often, feedback emails are anything but.  That first time you put up the feedback button, you think, “Hey, someone’s going to email us and tell us they love that widget 13 pixels above the comment box.  It’s much better than the 5 pixels we argued about for half an hour.”  Surprisingly enough, it doesn’t work that way.

So, how do sites actually get meaningful feedback from their users?

Analytics

There’s no better way to understand what your users do and don’t like data and analytics.  You can get an unlimited amount of information about your users if you know how to pimp out your Google Analytics the right now.  If you’re not going to tell us what you like and don’t like with your words, well, we’re just going to figure it out with your clicks.  The only problem with analytics, though, is that it only tells you what people like and don’t like.  The “why” people like and don’t like your service is up to you to figure out.  Maybe some of these other methods help…

Social Media

Like I said, after today’s Wikinvest launch, we saw four meaningful feedback emails; however, the TechCrunch article had 19 comments.  The Giga Om and Wall Street Journal articles had a few more.  On Twitter, the flood of Wikinvest references certainly helped too.  Users are talking about your site, they’re just not talking to you so you have to go out and find them.

Group Protest

This one’s exclusive to sites that allow it’s users to form groups around certain passions.  That’s right, I’m talking to you Facebook.  Who knew you were so lucky to have groups you could go to like, “The New New NEW Facebook Redesign Sucks — Boycott Facebook! — Oh wait, no, we actually like it now.”

Power Users

At Wikinvest, we’ve discovered a novel way of getting feedback from our users — talking to them!  On the phone even!  A group of power users helps propel Wikinvest’s content, but, almost more importantly, they’re invaluable to feedback about new products and features.  They tell us what we should and shouldn’t be doing, help fill in gaps in our team’s knowledge base, and often, they just know what they want better than we do.  You might call them consiglieres; oh wait, we do call them consiglieres.  Thanks guys!

Posted in How To, Users Comments