At no other time in history have businesses had more access to customers at scale than they do now, and product development stands to benefit from this perhaps more than any other group. Input from social media, though, can be both a blessing and a curse, as people don’t always know precisely what they think or want. There’s a quote widely attributed to Henry Ford, founder of the Ford Motor Company, that goes, “If I had asked the people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”
It’s easy to make the mistake of treating all customer input as gospel. Feedback is incredibly important, but that being said, you should take that feedback in the context of everything else you know about your product and your brand. A few complaints are not necessarily representative of your entire userbase, so the feedback you’re seeing may not be completely representative of the truth. There are several tactics you can employ to make sure you’re gleaning all the right benefits of this customer feedback without assigning artificial weight.
Create beta/tester communities: This can be done in a couple of ways. You can curate a list of community members who would be most helpful—power users from across the social web, enthusiast bloggers, and so on—into a group connected by email, a Facebook group, or other social mechanism. You can also create special restricted areas of your forum-based communities where these power users can converse, engage, and network while participating in conversations you generate. This special access can serve as a reward for those community members, and it can lead to incredibly useful insights for you and your brand.
Listen for your competition: As you listen for product feedback, you’ll want to analyze sentiment, look out for specific problems, and see what the greater community says about your competitors. Conversations happening around your competition’s products/offerings can provide endless amounts of insight for your own efforts.