Users gripe, Adobe listens

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Have you ever had an experience using a product that motivated you to tell the world about it? Web designers Erik Frick and Adam Meisel did. Their professional use of Adobe products spawned the creation of a small site called Dear Adobe that could be used as a sounding board to vent their frustrations.

Once launched, news of the site traveled fast, and almost a thousand entries (mostly rants) were posted to the site in the first 24 hours. Inside of 48 hours, Adobe began to take notice with John Nack, Adobe’s Principal Product Manager for Photoshop writing about the site on his blog and actually crafting responses to several of the Dear Adobe rants. In just two weeks time the site exploded to over a million page views and hundreds of new submissions were being added daily.

Dear Adobe

Sites like these are a continued reminder to companies that consumers can have a significant impact on your brand in the online space. Fortunately, Adobe was listening and is now getting involved in responding to the gripes. This was a good first step for them to make, but what else could they do to leverage the situation? Hopefully, Adobe executives are able to see this as an opportunity to take a lesson from Dell’s Ideastorm community and purchase the site to integrate it into Adobe.com. It would be a bold move that would show the Adobe community that they really do care.

Ultimately, what Adobe does with all the rants (aka, valuable information) still remains to be seen. Their product suite has been around for a very long time and has grown to mammoth proportions. The cost of implementing some of the most popular changes might be next to impossible without major re-writes, while others like adjusting their prices (currently the #2 most popular gripe) might be easier to implement.

Takeaways

Put yourself in Adobe’s shoes and reflect on how your own company currently interacts with the online space. What online monitoring processes does your company have in place? Are you prepared to get involved and respond to your customer community when a “Dear YourCompanyName” site suddenly pops up? What is stopping you from boldly implementing your own Dear Adobe?

Persuasive Picks for the week of 09/01/08

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Podcastin TrendsPodcasting dead or alive? TrendsSpotting marketing indicators
Taly Weiss from Trendspotting.com dives head first into a well researched post about podcasting trends and whether podcasts still provide value as a new media tool.

A List of Social Media Marketing Examples
Peter Kim launched an extremely valuable list of brands that are currently using social media. He invites readers to contribute to this ongoing list via the comments section where he’ll integrate submissions into the main post on a periodic basis.

Making the case for social media in PR
Shannon Paul knocks another one out of the park with this great post on stepping back from the hype of social media tools and getting back to basic communication.

Social Punishment: The “Bozo” Feature
Every once in a while Community Managers need to deal with “troublemakers” within their online communities. Jeremiah Owyang approaches the subject by suggesting the “Bozo” feature as potential solution. Be sure to dive into the comments section for a good discussion on the topic.

A fresh take on the browser
One of the most blogged about topics this week was the release of Chrome, Google’s new web browser. This post on the Google blog started the avalanche. Continue the reading from these Techmeme links.

Social Media + New York City + Fashion Week = Inside the Tents

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We’ve been having a great time with our client Gift Girl – and we haven’t even launched yet! In addition to some fun pre-launch video interviews, Gift Girl has now teamed with My It Things to create Inside The Tents – an aggregated inside look from fashionista bloggers and reporters covering Mercedes Benz Fashion week in New York City, which kicks off tomorrow.

Combining social media technologies and fashion, Inside The Tents “was born to provide a fresh look into the very exclusive Bryant Park Tents during Mercedes Benz Fashion week. As more and more independent new media journalists are getting access into behind the scenes of the most fabulous fashion event of the season, they share with the world news and observations usually left to selected group of magazine editors.”

This unique effort aggregates feeds from various social media communities and applications such as Twitter, Flickr, live blogging and video streaming, “sometimes getting ahead of the traditional media to bring the latest trends to the fashion aficionados around the web.”

If you can’t be there live for this to-die-for fashion event, be sure to follow Inside the Tents for everything fashion coming out of Bryant Park in this coming week. Tecchies may find it of interest as well – it should be fun to see social media in action outside of the traditional business world.