In the article they also give some tips on how businesses of any size can deal with negative feedback, which I thought the readers of this blog may find handy. Most of it distills down to using common sense and dealing with the situation calmly, with a positive and constructive attitude. Paraphrased and with my own views added:

1. Embrace the medium. Register for an account at the places your customers are talking about you. In most cases registering for an account is free. An account will generally allow you to receive alerts and give you a chance to respond to reviews and engage your customers.

2. Breathe. Just because you can respond doesn’t mean you should right away. Try to collect your thoughts calmly, and respond in a thoughtful constructive way. Also remember – anything you say, even in a private message, can end up on the internet.

Read rest of the tips here →

1. Clarity of Purpose
Summarize the company’s business on the back of a business card.

2. Large Markets
Address existing markets poised for rapid growth or change. A market on the path to a $1B potential allows for error and time for real margins to develop.

3. Rich Customers
Target customers who will move fast and pay a premium for a unique offering.

4. Focus
Customers will only buy a simple product with a singular value proposition.

5. Pain Killers
Pick the one thing that is of burning importance to the customer then delight them with a compelling solution.

6. Think Differently
Constantly challenge conventional wisdom. Take the contrarian route. Create novel solutions. Outwit the competition.

7. Team DNA
A company’s DNA is set in the first 90 days. All team members are the smartest or most clever in their domain. “A” level founders attract an “A” level team.

8. Agility
Stealth and speed will usually help beat-out large companies.

9. Frugality
Focus spending on what’s critical. Spend only on the priorities and maximize profitability.

10. Inferno
Start with only a little money. It forces discipline and focus. A huge market with customers yearning for a product developed by great engineers requires very little firepower.

source: SEQUOIA CAPITAL

Curiously enough, what got Segway into this problem was that the company was itself a kind of Segway. It was too easy for them; they were too successful raising money. If they’d had to grow the company gradually, by iterating through several versions they sold to real users, they’d have learned pretty quickly that people looked stupid riding them. Instead they had enough to work in secret. They had focus groups aplenty, I’m sure, but they didn’t have the people yelling insults out of cars. So they never realized they were zooming confidently down a blind alley.

– Paul Graham, YCombinator

My take:

- I agree, raising “too much” capital for an idea is poison. Having to do a lot with a little instills discipline, and forces one to be uber-resourceful, razor focused, and quite frankly a little paranoid :) I’m extremely lucky to have mentors like David who have drilled this mantra into my head. We achieved a lot with little at both Lookery and Compete.com, and now Shareaholic.

- Iterative design is the way to go. All of us that create applications for which we can push updates and upgrades at-will at not much cost are blessed. Criminal not to take advantage of this gift.

- Focus groups? Community Managers (= everyone in the company) should be curating the feedback loop from in the field – talking to real users, asking them how we can improve our products, create the most value for them, and knock down the most roadblocks in the process — in short, make their lives easier.

Users first, always.

This morning I rediscovered this (previously unpublished) transcript from February 2008 in my archives.

I was Product Manager of Compete.com at the time, and it goes into how we managed and thought about our user community at Compete, a critical component that helped us surpass 1 million monthly unique visitors to Compete.com very quickly. I’ve carried much of this thinking over to Shareaholic, a tool that has been used by over 1 million people. At Shareaholic we obsess over our users, always putting our users first.

Hope you find this to be a useful read. Enjoy!

1. Who do you work for, what do they do, and what is your official job title?

Compete, Inc is a competitive web analytics company. We have a diverse sample of over two million U.S. internet users that have given us permission to aggregate and analyze all the web pages they visit and ask them questions via surveys. We believe that web analytics means analyzing what consumers do across the entire web, not just what they do within a particular site, and that marketers can use this rich information across the entire company, not just for online media planning or site design decisions.

We’ve been doing custom web analytics work for big brands such as Verizon, Chrysler and Wells Fargo for over 7 years now. Just over 13 months ago we launched compete.com. Compete.com is targeted towards the millions of people dependent upon their website/online presence to drive their business. Up until the launch of compete.com there really was no affordable, reliable and consistent source of competitive web analytics for the average marketer.

As for my own role with Compete, I’ve been with the company for just over 3 years, and my official job title is – Product Manager, Compete.com

2. Now that you have experience actually doing it, what does community management mean at Compete?

We won’t be satisfied until compete.com is the go-to industry source for the most precise competitive web analytics data available. For this to happen, we need to build a large community users that regularly use, trust and recommend Compete data – our advocates.

Generally, communities do not build themselves. They need some nurturing. I like Chris Brogan’s description of the role:

“The people gathered before you aren’t an orchestra and you are not a conductor. At best, you are a jam manager. You are the person helping bring about the experience, but with your hands as far off the overall end results as possible.”

At Compete, community management/evangelism translates to encouraging and supporting early users, enabling two-way transparent conversations about Compete, looking for and enabling people who might be interested in what we do, listening and responding to feedback (the good and the bad), setting up and managing user expectations, integrating user feedback into product roadmap decisions, being the customer’s voice within Compete, and generally being available, easy to reach, and responsive.

3. If a community manager does their job well, what happens as a result?

We hope good things :) In all seriousness, in my experience users tend to feel a greater sense of ownership of the product. This leads to our users being happier, they engage more with the product, tend to talk more favorably about their experiences, and give us more (constructive) feedback in return. They become our advocates.

4. What is much more of a challenge than you originally anticipated?

As Product Manager of Compete.com, community development is not my only focus. I wish there were more hours in the day! (well, doesn’t everyone?) Balancing the two roles simultaneously is a little bit of a challenge as community management can be a full time job in-itself.

At Compete, we made sure product and community go hand in hand. Our users heavily influence product direction. I love being close to our users, and I am also lucky to have great colleagues who also love interacting and cultivating our community, and they do a fantastic job at it.

5. What technologies do you use to interact with your community?

The Compete Blog (wordpress) is used extensively to educate our users on how to most effectively look at and analyze Compete data. We use Technorati to monitor incoming blog links, and our local analytics package (IndexTools – now Yahoo Analytics) to monitor non-blog mentions like Digg, Reddit, Slashdot, etc. Shareaholic to spread and seed content on social media sites. We also use twitter, email, im, newsletters, mybloglog, facebook and field regular feedback surveys. Twitter’s “track” feature in particular has proven to be very effective. Google Alerts are also great to monitor conversations about Compete.

6. What specific metrics (if any) do you focus on for success?

We focus on unique visitors to compete.com, repeat visits, registrations, feed subscribers, incoming links, and the quality and frequency of blog and press mentions. We track these metrics on a daily basis, and make them available to the entire company weekly. We also field a user feedback survey at least once each quarter, in which we ask our users to rate our performance, and whether they would recommend us to a friend or colleague (Net Promoter Score) — we track this closely.

7. What is the most important skill to have as a community manager?

Listening skills, humility, being attentive, inquisitive and responsive. Community management is a constant process of listening, sharing, and enabling.

8. What are the best/worst parts about being a community manager?

The best part of the role is connecting directly with people who use Compete.com, and those who are just waiting to be converted! As Product Manager, learning how the products are actually being used is invaluable. The job can also be very different every day, which is exhilarating.

9. Let’s imagine that there was a company directive to “increase engagement” with your customers. How would you, in a community management role, go about doing that?

The end strategy would depend upon how “engagement” is being defined and end business goals. At a high level – at Compete.com we have the luxury of over 700,000 monthly unique visitors, and over 70,000 registered users that are quite active on the site. I would likely first reach out to them, followed by people who are already talking about us (positive or negative). I would ask them how we can improve our products, create the most value for them, and knock down the most roadblocks.

As we engage the community more in such conversations, and as we start incorporating their feedback, overall user engagement should hopefully increase.

Today, I am pleased to announce that the Open Share Icon has a new website!

Learn more about Open Share Icons here

If you use the NoScript Firefox Add-on, please make sure you read this.

If you have any suggestions whatsoever, please do let us know. We’d love your feedback. A big thank you to you for sticking with us in our journey to make Shareaholic simply the best way to share stuff online.

Learn more about Shareaholic v1.7 here!

I stitched together this short 02:53 video from the main keynote recording. Hope you like it!
Full keynote video can be viewed here.

IE8 users, get it now! –

Find out how to get one here.

Read full post here | Get Shareaholic @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5457

Firefox is gearing up to set a Guinness World Record for the most software downloaded in 24 hours by encouraging all 175 million+ Firefox users to upgrade in a single day.

Final shipping date is estimated for mid-June. Release Candidate 2 is currently expected to be available on Wednesday, June 4th.

Are you in? Sign up now to get notified when Firefox 3 goes out the door.

Read full post here | Get Shareaholic @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5457

What does this mean for Shareaholic? More exposure, resulting in a bigger user & feedback community. According to Basil Hashem, the directory currently receives about 5 million pageviews per day with approximately 3% of the traffic to the recommended list.

None of this would be possible without your support. A BIG BIG thank you to Mozilla, and our users for supporting, using, and believing in Shareaholic.

When the community asks, we give. So we went to work, and we’re pleased to announce that Shareaholic now fully supports Songbird!

You can download Songbird @ http://www.songbirdnest.com
Shareaholic @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5457

> READ THE FULL POST HERE

What do Garrett Camp (founder, StumbleUpon), Brendan Eich (CTO, Mozilla and creator of JavaScript), Jesse James Garrett (president, Adaptive Path), Tariq Karim (founder, NetVibes), and Joshua Schachter (founder, del.icio.us) have in common?

They were all part of the tech celebrity judge panel that picked Shareaholic as a Grand Prize winner of Extend Firefox 2, a Mozilla sponsored contest for the best Firefox extensions!

The winners were announced last week. Three Firefox extensions, including Shareaholic (!!), were named Grand Prize winners after being selected from a list of more than 100 submissions.

About Extend Firefox 2:

Extend Firefox is a developer contest to encourage development and innovation in Web experience through add-ons to Firefox 2.

All entries were judged and scored by a panel of experts based upon excellence in: (a) User Experience (30%); (b) Creativity (30%); (c) Platform Leverage (15%); (d) Technical Correctness (15%); (e) Open Source and Use of Standards (10%).

Check out Mozilla’s official announcement and rest of the winners and runners up here.

The grand prizes are awesome, but we are very much more excited about how many more people will now find out about Shareaholic as a result of winning the contest, and the resulting momentum. If you don’t already have Shareaholic, you can get it here.

A big thank YOU for supporting, using, and believing in Shareaholic. Much more to come :)

A couple of days ago, David and I decided that it was time to put up an about us page for Bzzster.

Though not everyone wants to know more about us, and it is probably the last page that most people will visit, we don’t want to disappoint those who do want to know more about the people, idea and values behind Bzzster and Shareaholic.

About Bzzster: http://bzzster.com/about

We pushed out Shareaholic v1.3.3 this past weekend! This version was a near complete re-write, with many interface, functionality and under the hood improvements.

Click for details

The reviews, encouragement, and suggestions keep rolling in for Shareaholic! We just released an update incorporating some of the suggestions. Thank you everyone. More coming soon.

Get the latest version of the add-on from shareaholic.com or Mozilla.