Last week, two apparently unrelated things conspired to get me thinking about community, customer feedback, and how to turn customer engagement into smarter, better-informed products.

First, Projectline’s book club gathered to chat about Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody, which does a great job of explaining the social and organizational changes we’re seeing as the internet enables rapid sharing and easy communication. In our conversation, we spent a lot of time trying to puzzle out what new ways of organizing will mean for everyone doing business online (and offline). Shirky’s examples compellingly illustrated that traditional organizations are often terrible at predicting just how users will wind up using what they make. We didn’t quite solve the question of how to balance the need to monetize (which sometimes takes the form of restricting use) with the desire to provide the flexibility to let customers determine the use of the product (which often makes it much more widely used).

Second, Ars Technica reported on the PC release of popular video game Modern Warfare 2, which has been (and continues to be) wildly successful as a console game. In what looked like an effort at customer engagement, Best Buy hosted a question-and-answer session between Infinity Ward (the game developer) representatives and PC gamers. But instead of fostering real engagement, the conversation wound up highlighting the game’s fundamental disregard for PC gamers’ myriad ways of playing.

Ars Technica concluded:

At launch, this will be one of the most locked-down, inflexible, and gamer-unfriendly games ever created. It won’t stay that way, of course. The pirates will have the game up on the torrent sites soon, if they haven’t already, and the code will be ripped apart and modded to allow everything gamers want. How quickly will dedicated servers pop up for these pirates? It’s hard to say…but we have a feeling it won’t be long. Those that buy the game legally will have no choice but to play exactly how the developer and publisher want them to.

So instead of working with the vibrant, vocal PC gaming community to help them play how they want, Infinity Ward is restricting how the game is played. Of course, there are benefits to controlling their product, but because users have the tools to circumvent restrictions (and tell each other how), the restrictions could force illegal use of this version of the game. This is probably not a huge concern for the developers, thanks to the astronomical popularity of the console version, but neither is it an ideal example of customer engagement.*

So what do these two things have to do with each other? I think they both come back to the reality that an active, excited customer base isn’t quite enough for genuine engagement between company and customers.

What does it take to get to real engagement?

• Pay attention: Go beyond the basic brand questions (“do they like us or hate us?”). What do they love about the product (or similar ones)? What drives them nuts? What workarounds have they found? What are they teaching each other? Who’s an obvious leader in the community? Track the answers–for your own products and your competitors.
• Take their advice (or at least some of it): Give the customers’ feedback to the developers as well as the marketing team. The people building the product have to be on the same team as the users–if they feel like antagonists, it won’t work out well for the business. With early feedback, the product development team can plan for users’ priorities, which makes those later conversations a lot more pleasant.
• Talk with customers, not to them: In the Best Buy-sponsored chat, the Infinity Ward representatives had canned answers for any question they didn’t like. Of course, the community spotted them quickly and questioned their sincerity (in a flowchart, of course).

What lessons would you take from this story? How do you engage customers meaningfully through development, launch, and beyond?

^*Note: I’m no gamer myself, so many thanks to Chris Opsahl from our Customer Evidence team for his expert advice on the gaming landscape.

tags: book club, customer communities, customer engagement, product development