(photo was taken from a small yogurt shop in Santa Cruz)

When I say critics I mean customers, users, clients, bloggers, etc. I mean anyone that uses your product or your service; how are you getting feedback from them? If you offer a product or service to people but then are not getting good or bad feedback, it is difficult to evaluate success, satisfaction, and company direction. Your users would love to talk to you and tell you what they love and hate about your product, let them! That way you know what you need to improve upon or what you should leave alone. There are many ways to get feedback from your users:

• Comments from blogs
• E-mails directly to management
• Surveys
• Phone calls with clients (or users/etc.)
• Meetings with clients (or users/etc.)
• Twitter replies or direct messages

The list can go on and on, virtually any social media platform can become a method of getting feedback from your “critics.” Feedback is probably one of the most valuable things for a company and should be encouraged, especially from the loyal users and enthusiasts. Look at the Apple fans. Year after year they demand and ask for things from Apple and most of the time they get it, because they are very vocal about what they want and Apple encourages and listens to user feedback. This is probably one of the greatest reasons that has contributed to Apple’s success. If Apple didn’t encourage and get feedback, how would they what features to build into their products? How would they know what they need to improve on? How would they know what the users expect? The answer is they wouldn’t. Don’t underestimate the importance of feedback and make sure to ask and encourage it whenever and wherever possible. Make it EASY for people to give feedback, if you ask for feedback and make users go through a 5 step process, then you might as well not bother.

Thanks for reading

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