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Negative Feedback is a Positive for Online Communities

Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Mon, Jun 29, 2009
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Absolute value of negative feedback
Far and away, the most common objection we hear from organizations considering extending their survey panel into an online community is that community members will hear each other’s negative feedback. When you survey customers, employees or other key constituencies, only the survey administrator sees all the negative comments.  When you move to an online community, anyone who logs in can see the negative comments.
 
This is more an opportunity than an issue. In fact, the absolute value of negative feedback is positive. Here’s why:
  1. Criticisms provide authenticity. Imagine, for a moment, that you hosted an online community and never received any bad reviews or comments. Since every organization and its product and services has shortcomings, an online community where those shortcomings were never discussed would seem unauthentic. It would seem like a sham or a marketing exercise, rather than a true community.
  2. Negative feedback is scarcer than positive feedback. That scarcity makes it worth more. Online communities excel at generating thousands of positive ideas—more ideas than your organization can implement. Negative feedback is rarer than organizations realize and often clusters around key areas that your organization has ignored or handled poorly; negative feedback gives you a chance to prioritize these issues and focus on improving them.
  3. Negative feedback is actionable. Negative feedback gives you an opportunity to respond. If a customer tells you ten features they want in the next edition of your product or service, there is nothing you can do for them today but to let them know you are listening and building a list. If they complain about a product damaged in shipping, or a mistake on an invoice, or confusion around a feature, you can immediately help them resolve the issue. Quick resolution of these issues demonstrates that your organization listens and cares.
  4. Better to manage negative feedback on your turf. The fact of the matter is that people are commenting on your organization all over the World Wide Web: on Twitter, on Facebook, on LinkedIn and on the next big social networking site that we haven’t heard of yet. Brand monitoring solutions can catch some of this commentary, but not all of it: many social networks only show designated friends each other’s comments. Right now on Facebook there’s a long discussion going on about why your organization is awful to do business with, and you will never see or be able to respond to that discussion. When the criticism happens on your site, you can instantly read and respond.
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