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!

In plain English, Crazy Egg shows you how your visitors use your site. Where are they clicking?

Crazy Egg offers 5 free tests of their service so I recently started a month long Crazy Egg test. Soon after I began, I wrote about the wpSearch plugin for WordPress. Crazy Egg tells me that people actually read this blog and try some of these things out. That’s good to know. It also tells me people tend to click the “Enter” in “Enter Venture” because it looks like a button. The other major button, the LinkedIn button, is second only to the search bar in number of clicks.  It even tells me I need to do something about that subscribe button…

Rather than explain any more though, just check out Crazy Egg’s results for Enter Venture. The images (and free trials) speak for themselves:

The Heat View - The heat view shows you a rough focal point for a user’s eye for popular areas.

The Confetti View — This is great for figuring out exactly where your users clicked. Notice, most of my users do not click Search. They must key it.

Statistics Overlay - This view gives you both the number of clicks and the exact element that is actioned with those clicks.

The different views do overlap a bit with their function, but so be it. They look cool in the process. I’ve been thinking about experimenting with advertisements on Enter Venture at some point. Crazy Egg’s $9/month (after a few more free trials) would likely be money well spent to help maximize those advertisements.

I had actually been waiting for that as a type of milestone. The last time no one visited the site for an entire day was May 10th. I kept writing and watching my visitor statistics in order to keep myself out of the red. I wanted to see how long I could keep the streak going. 113 days later, I’m happy with the results.

I started this blog on April 16th and have been tracking my visitors and subscribers ever since. (On June 9th, I added both Feedburner stats and WordPress stats. For the next Enter Venture stats update, I’ll have more data to compare all three.)

In my Enter Venture Update post from June 9th, I mentioned the most popular posts up to that time:

1. Columbia Venture Community
2. Dealing with Constraints
3. Back up, what the feed are you talking about?

Now, the most popular posts, not including pre-June 9th data, are:

1. Two Ideas for the NY Startup Scene
2. NY Video 2.0
3. Columbia Venture Community
4. Mashable Exhibit Hall – NY Internet Week
5. The value of engineering education

I’ve noticed two popular trends for the blog — events and ideas. Events bring tend to bring in the most traffic, but it’s more fickle. People go to an event, read about the event, and then the event passes on. Ideas tend to bring in lasting users, users that subscribe, users that comment.

Going back to one of my earliest posts, What this blog will be about, the one thing that hasn’t seemed to break the popular posts lists are my book posts (actually, these updates haven’t either). I think this is a case when I’m going to ignore my users though. I like those book posts and hope that they’ll become a better resource when I’ve compiled a bigger, more comprehensive list for early web entrepreneurs.

Check out some of the other things I’ve learned about my readers over the past few months:

Geography:

• 86% US (Largely NY, California, and Massachusetts)
• 3.8% India (Mostly from Hyderabad — what’s up guys?)
• 1.67% Canada
• < 1% from 23 others (significant time spent by users from Germany, Sweden, and Taiwan)

Referred by sites:

• 47% Direct traffic
• 24% Google referrals
• 6% Gmail referrals
• 3% Read Write Web referral

Using the following browsers:

• 62% Firefox
• 24% Internet Explorer
• 14% Safari

Much can be learned from these few tidbits about how I’m gaining traffic, what my users are like, and where they’re coming from. Stay tuned for future Enter Venture developments that will address what I’m going to do with this information. The first goal was to simply get people reading this blog. Next, I’m going to focus on how to grow Enter Venture.

Enjoy your 4th of July.

Sometimes the right choice is no team at all — but this is not the sustainable or scalable option for most operations.

How does an entrepreneur, and a starving one at that, build a team of like-minded, competent, individuals who will work with and not against the entrepreneur or each other?

I don’t know the right answer, but have a running theory:

The optimal team is build both with trusted associates, as well as with experimental new talent.  Unfortunately, payroll takes capital. If you’re starving, that capital comes out of the marketing budget or the R&D budget, or food/rent.

So how do you compensate a resource without funding?

Stay tuned for an upcoming post on incentives…

I have launched a social experiment of my own for new talent that includes both experiential incentives and targeted good faith.

My current team includes a few trusted associates, all part-time, and freelanced admin and skilled labor resources. If the experiment above goes well, it will include a few more feet on the ground.

I can’t seem to post word documents to the blog, but am happy to let people see it. It exemplifies much of what I believe in partnering with your talent and structuring fair incentives.

I would be glad to share it with anyone who is interested, and don’t even mind if you use it as long as you ask.