How blogs can connect you with your customers - and it’s happening right now

There’s a great example of what blogging means for the way in which you relate to your customers being played out on web right at the moment. Six Apart is the company that developed the Moveable Type blogging software application which powers this and a huge number of other blogs - and they’ve just (in the past 24 hours) brought out the latest version.

This wouldn’t be news unless you were particularly interested in weblog software, were it not for the fact that at the same time, Six Apart have revamped their pricing structure. Previously, the software was free for non-commercial use, with a flat-rate fee for use in for-profit situations. Now that’s all changed, and the changes are kicking up a storm.

As you’d expect from a company writing this type of software, the changes were announced on the blog of Mena Trott, one half of the original founders of Six Apart. Her article is upbeat and enthusiastic, as you’d expect, selling the benefits of the new package and justifying the charging structure. But scroll on down to the trackbacks - excerpts of comments about the article on other blogs - and a completely different picture emerges. The changes are being universally decried as counter-productive, unfair and generally bad news for the customers of Six Apart. So on the one hand, the company is pitching its new product and explaining why the pricing was right, and on exactly the same forum, the customers are weighing in with exactly the opposite view. The conversations aren’t being played out behind the scenes in support forums or “sucks” sites - they’re right there on the front page for everyone to see.

Which is a pretty courageous thing for Six Apart to do, in my opinion. It’s not something you could imagine a large corporate business doing - imagine if Shell gave over a significant proportion of it’s corporate website to opinions protesting its activities in Nigeria, for example.

And there’s two ways an organisation could look at this. One is to throw up their hands in horror at the potential for negative publicity, and pull the dissenting views off the page. It’s probably not being too cynical to wonder if that’s not what the vast majority of organisations would do - scarcely a day goes by without another story about a company seeking to shut down a site or a forum where customers are expressing negative views.

But the alternative would be to look at this as customer feedback of the most direct and valuable kind possible. Here’s one of the most important decisions a company can take, and the feedback is almost universally negative. At the very least, you’d want to revisit some of your assumptions in the light of the criticisms, if not start to wonder “have we got it completely wrong?” And you’re not getting this feedback in six months time as the sales graph starts to head south - it’s as soon as the product hits the market.

What Six Apart will do remains to be seen, but we can be fairly sure that they’ll be sitting up and taking notice of the comments.

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