Tag Archive

Get Satisfaction

The Get Satisfaction website is a helpful tool for users to come together and share comments, questions and complaints about a topic, company or product.

The good

Aesthetically the website looks very nice with large buttons and uses relatively large fonts, presumably to make it easier for users to navigate the site.

The site does a good job at organizing the content, differentiating posts as: questions, ideas, problems and discussions. It is further sub-categorized between topics that are latest, recently active and unanswered. Accessing the terms of service and about section of the website is a bit tricky to find at first, having to scroll down to the bottom until you found the links. Most websites have a link to the about page right at the top making it easy to find when first browsing a webpage.

The bad

Despite the large fonts and buttons, it is somewhat difficult and not intuitive to navigate. I find the design and layout of the site a bit too “cartoonish” which takes away from the content.

pbwiki

pbwiki has what is considered a very active account on Get Satisfaction with 1,444 posts and 24 company representatives monitoring it. Just quickly looking now, I only saw one post that hadn’t been responded to by a rep and that was posted a couple hours ago. All other posts were answered at least once by a company rep acknowledging the suggestion or providing answers to a question. The company reps reply in a very friendly and informative manner. The reps always answer follow up questions resulting in appreciative and thankful users. I suspect the overall positive tone towards pbwiki is because of the prompt response users receive when posting a query.

Facebook

The Facebook section on the Get Satisfaction has a very different tone than the pbwiki section. The Facebook section has zero company reps answering questions and complaints. Their lack of customer engagement has resulted with comments written with obvious resentment and anger towards Facebook. The majority of the posts are by users who feel they have been unfairly suspended from Facebook for violating the terms of use. Most of the users suspect they are getting suspended for overusing the site and incorrectly appearing as spammers. The one thing you will come away with after reading this section is how frustrated the customers are with how difficult it is to get in touch with Facebook’s customer service.

Use in PR

As a soon-to-graduate PR student, and one that wants to specialize in social media no less, I envision Get Satisfaction growing in popularity and usage.  We learn that good PR is about maintaining good relationships with targeted publics, as can be seen with the success of pbwiki.  As a result of company reps actively engaging in conversations with users, they will then spread the word and tell their friends and colleagues to use their service.  This is why companies need to be actively engaged with their users.  It’s really not very time consuming-just takes a little bit of effort and you’ll see the difference in attitude among your customers.

I hope that Get Satisfaction gains in popularity and enters the mainstream forcing Facebook, and others with zero reps, to get involved and start listening to what is being said about them.