by Len Kendall
Depending on how you look at it, the U.S. Government is one of the largest companies in the world. On March 24th, the “CEO” of this “company” utilized a Digg-Like voting system to address the most common questions that American’s had on their minds.

More than 13,000 different questions were submitted and 400,000 votes were cast to help filter the most pressing to the top. Clearly, there was no shortage of opportunity. By implementing this system, Obama used the will of the crowd to:
1) Shape the topics of discussion when addressing the nation
2) Show the crowd that the oval office is acknowledging their importance in driving the country’s success.
3) Illustrate transparency and democratization of modern government
Should brands replicate this effort?
The importance of the issues discussed in the President’s forum obviously shouldn’t be bestowed upon brands, but replicating that system could certainly prove beneficial. It’s no secret that consumers are talking about the brands they use, but if further proof is needed simply run a search on Google for “Brand X + Review.” There’s a lot of negative unhelpful chatter but if even 10% of millions of pieces of feedback are useful, then perhaps it does make sense to facilitate a conversation around improving a brand and its marketing efforts.
Legal issues aside (which do affect certain categories more significantly such as insurance) there are multiple benefits of hosting a feedback forum, to name a few:
Market Research: Focus Groups, Test Markets, and R&D Departments are very expensive. While hosting a “town hall” for your brand isn’t going to replace these entities, it’s a very realistic way of reducing the size of them. Additionally it can act as low cost experiment before launching any real products in test markets.
Reciprocation: It’s much easier to respond to consumers in one central location vs. scouring the web for brand mentions in various locations. The latter is certainly a good practice too, but when budgets and manpower make that prohibitive, a brand hosted forum is a great place to start. A side benefit is that for the consumers who are looking to engage with you, by focusing response efforts on your platform will condition the community to talk in your environment vs. their own (IF they want to hear back from you).
Personalization: Imagine you’re a person who submitted a question to President Obama and he actually read it. How would you feel? The President is obviously a person but also a symbol. If that symbol talks to you, then it turns it into a person. A person is much harder to dislike than an object. Similarly, brands are objects. But they aren’t blocked off from having a face. More and more “faces” are emerging to represent brands. Even if it’s in short semi annual sessions, a brand that gives (and publicizes) its open forum with customers humanizes that brand. The ideal situation is that people will like you for it, and when they don’t, they’ll be more likely to empathize.
On Your Playground or Ours?
There are three main paths here. Brand-driven forums like Dell Idea Storm and American Express Open Forum or conversely, user driven feedback channels such as GetSatisfaction and niche forums like “Please Fix the iPhone.”
Brand-Driven: A portal built by, moderated, and used as a spotlight for a brand. Although the volume may be smaller, the engagement is much higher and centralized.
Consumer Driven: No avenue exists for customers to voice their feedback so either they create one or join one of many broad forums that give them a voice. Unlike the above, feedback is scattered and often less constructive as there are no ears to hear legitimate complains.
Hybrid: Previously mentioned Get Satisfaction provides brands with an opportunity to participate in the discussion the feedback aggregator hosts. (Including feedback widgets and owning a profile). This is a combination of the previous two however the consumer’s voice most likely will still be stronger in this setting.
Could this practice tie into marketing programs?
What’s the biggest obstacle for hosting and moderating a town hall for your company? Cost of technology and cost of labor to manage/grow it. Because of that reality, every possible resource needs to be squeezed out of this entity to justify its existence. Besides the payoffs mentioned earlier, this forum can also be leverage for future marketing efforts.
Search: Think you’re buying all the right keywords on Google to drive efficient traffic to your site? Think again. There are topics/keywords that a company will simply not think to include in their search efforts. If you’re using a voting system to show trending topics of discussion on your own forum, you’ll know what respective keywords to buy for your search efforts. Although difficult to quantify in terms of payoff, the opportunity costs could be astronomical if you are able to sneak past your competitors in search results.
Insights and Planning: One of the most common complaints from agencies is that their client briefs don’t include enough information to build insights unique to the brand or consumers of that brand. Again, while it would be difficult to assign a specific economic value to providing more relevant insights, there are obvious benefits to having more poignant creative and better placed media as a result of more accurate insights. By watching an internal forum for top trending topics around a brand, clients would be able to feed their agency partners with more data and thus receive more effective planning.
Word-of-Mouth: Regardless if the forum is composed of your best or worst customers, more likely than not, they are the most vocal. For the purposes of making an announcement in a subtle, yet effective way, news can be built into a response within your answers. As an example, a question makes it to the top regarding your companies return policies. While answering it, the brand mentions “as of next week, return shipping is free.” This tid-bit (if genuinely a top concern of your customers) will spread across the web faster than any press release ever would. It doesn’t feel like advertising and it’s directed at the exact people who need to know about it.

People Will Still Talk Amongst Themselves
President Obama got a lot of people talking about political issues during the user forum, but this doesn’t mean that conversations won’t continue outside those walls. They will, and so will conversations around brands. The web makes it incredibly easy to discuss the brands that intersect with our lives so trying to contain that force is futile. But to pass up giving consumers a chance to also have those conversations with you is a huge missed opportunity. Let people talk to you. Let them know you care about what they have to say. Then prove it.
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Len Kendall is a digital media manager at Critical Mass Chicago where he manages strategy and activation for fortune 500 companies.
In Len’s downtime he can be found blogging at www.constructivegrumpiness.com where he tries to lend his innovative thinking to help improve brands, products, and experiences. You can also Follow Len on Twitter.

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