What do Hootsuite and Dominoes have in common? Apparently, a common approach to using negative consumer feedback to discover opportunities for change and improvement. This article on LinkedIn was posted four days ago by Ryan Holmes, and is titled “Your product is a piece of sh#t: How my company responded to this.” The article discusses how Hootsuite took inspiration from Domino’s response to a bad PR incident, in which Domino’s asked its consumers for feedback, then published the feedback (both good and bad) before using it to make changes to its product. The campaign was a huge success, with Domino’s now doing better than ever. Hootsuite took the same approach when it came time to redesign the Hootsuite dashboard, and reports that users have been happy with its open and transparent approach to the project.
This reminded me of the the social media triage discussion we had early in the semester, where we learned how to assess and respond to positive and negative comments posted about our client company on Facebook. What I think we can learn from both Domino’s and Hootsuite is that in dealing with negative comments, it’s not enough to simply “let post stand and monitor” in the long term, because there may be valuable information in these negative posts. And as is noted in the article, using pre-existing customer feedback from social media is much cheaper than doing market research in the form of focus groups. The big takeaway for me from this article is that monitoring is not enough; negative feedback should be viewed as an opportunity for improvement.