Home Get Satisfaction Leads Among Idea Aggregators

Get Satisfaction Leads Among Idea Aggregators

Finding new ways to reach, engage with, and learn from customers is a cornerstone of Enterprise 2.0. The idea and suggestion management space is one slice of that effort, and in this series we’ll review the major players in this space and look at what options your company has for participating in it. The idea and suggestion management space has essentially three types of vendor offerings (with some bleeding across categories).

This is a guest post by Tom Powell, who writes about innovative applications of customer co-design, outside innovation, and crowdsourcing at Co-Innovative.com.

Centralized Aggregators:

Anyone can start a product or company page on these sites to submit ideas, suggestions, or complaints, which are then voted up or down, Digg-style, and commented on. Companies pay for access to this data, more powerful features, and the ability to “claim” pages and register official employee moderators. Like review sites such as Epinions, conversation happens on these sites with or without you.

Tool Providers:

These systems provide similar functionality to that of the centralized aggregators listed above but are controlled and run by the companies themselves. They include features such as ratings (or up/down votes), moderation, the ability to limit the number of votes per user or the access of certain groups, time-limited contests, and automatic searching for duplicate idea submissions.

Integrated Innovation Management Suites:

The idea management portion of these suites generally have more robust capabilities, such as weighting the contributions of users according to expertise and trust, creating virtual currency systems, providing enterprise-class security, and customizing captured information. By integrating idea capturing and prioritization into a more robust and sophisticated system, companies can then evaluate the cost of ideas, put ideas through a formal review process, and track their performance from conception to execution.

So which aggregators should you be paying attention to? Which has the greatest reach? The strongest offering? The following rankings are based on estimates culled from Compete, Alexa, Quantcast, Google, Technorati, and the actual features offered in each.

Get Satisfaction

The big kahuna, with over a million unique visitors per month, Get Satisfaction is the most fully featured of the aggregators, and it allows for more flexibility in submission types and more nuanced engagement with customers than any of the others. Users can specify whether they have an idea, question, problem, or praise; and similar submissions are automatically displayed as the user types to avoid duplication.

As an added bonus for businesses, there are also numerous “Net Promoter” data-gathering widgets on company and product pages. Employees can register on the site and interact with customers, noting whether the status of a post is “Under review,” “In progress,” or “Resolved.”

Get Satisfaction suggests a process by which companies can ramp up, too: first, by each company linking to its page on Get Satisfaction; then by putting a widget on its own support page; and finally by signing up for the API to keep customers on its website. Basic pricing starts at $149, which allows up to 10 moderators and 10,000 API calls per day.

An interesting example illustrates the power and pitfalls of this type of system: on Twitter’s page, the top-rated idea is for a “Flag as spam” feature, which was posted 11 months ago. An employee then started an official thread asking “How would you prefer to report Twitter spam?” However, Twitter still does not have any spam-flagging capability, and officially it is still, 11 months later, collecting feedback after having received 215 replies. Yes, Twitter still has occasional difficulties simply remaining up, so it is not terribly surprising that this has not yet been implemented.

Get Satisfaction stats:

  • Recently hired a new CEO, Wendy Lea, and has raised $2.5 million.
  • Claims 13,000 companies, 10,000 products and services, and 1.5 million monthly customers.
  • Compete: 1.2 million visitors per month
  • Alexa rank: 21,810
  • Quantcast rank: 3,269
  • Technorati: 4,342 blog reactions
  • Incoming links according to Google: 2,000

SuggestionBox

Launched in open beta last year, SuggestionBox uses a five-lightbulb rating system, as opposed to up/down voting; otherwise, it overlaps with Get Satisfaction in a few areas. Users can choose to follow certain suggestions, companies can “claim” their pages, and companies can pass user suggestions through the API to SuggestionBox from their own sites. After signing up with SuggestionBox, companies have the ability to control which suggestions the public sees and to update the status of suggestions. Pricing is $49.50 per month for one suggestion box and one moderator.

SuggestionBox stats:

  • Compete: Spiked last May with 30,000 unique visitors per month, but now has about 15,000 to 20,000 per month.
  • Alexa rank: 189,345
  • Quantcast and Google Trends: no data
  • Technorati: 204 blog reactions
  • Incoming links according to Google: 264

FeVote and Featurelist

FeVote and Featurelist have not gained traction. The sites are free but have only the most basic features. Anyone can start a suggestion board about basically anything, and widgets are available, but activity and traffic are non-existent. For example, despite having launched two years ago, FeVote has gathered a mere 12 suggestions and 21 votes for the iPhone in the last year.

Fevote stats:

  • Compete: On a downward slope since March, to about 1,000 or 2,000 unique visitors per month now.
  • Alexa rank: 907,850
  • Technorati: 19 blog reactions
  • Incoming links according to Google: 33

Featurelist stats:

  • Compete: Fluctuating below 1,000 per month.
  • Alexa rank: 1,423,469
  • Technorati: 20 blog reactions
  • Incoming links according to Google: 16

As it stands, Get Satisfaction has the most traffic, strongest engagement, and most robust functionality; and it allows companies the most flexibility in connecting with customers.

Hard questions remain, though. Should your business engage with these tools, and do they provide real value? Will they survive if companies increasingly bring these systems in-house? These are difficult, nebulous questions whose answers depend on your situation and your view on how these tools influence customer opinion and engagement.

Any company itching to dip its toes in this space should first monitor and engage in the conversations on Get Satisfaction and SuggestionBox. If you find you want greater control and want to carry the conversations on your own site, check back here for Part 2 for a look at what the tool vendors have to offer.

Tom Powell writes about innovative applications of customer co-design, outside innovation, and crowdsourcing at Co-Innovative.com. He is finishing his MBA in Product Management and Entrepreneurship at Duke University in North Carolina.

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