Back in my olden days, I was a community manager for designers at a startup here in Boston. I would have loved to have this list of 20 tried and true ways to get satisfaction. One of my absolute favorites (and in the same vein as my previous post All Your Users are Rookies):

16. Old hat. Just because an issue is “old” to you, doesn’t mean it’s old to the person who is having it. In fact, it’s new to them. Don’t “uh duh!” them, help them out.

You don’t even really have to be a community manager to appreciate this list. Customer service folks, solo entrepreneurs, or just anyone that interacts with your member base should read (and study and print off and sleep with) this list.

Permalink! Stick tap to delivertheawesome.

Today’s Groupon Chicago deal was 50% off at the Gap. Berly loves shopping at the Gap, so I wanted to snatch one of these up for her.

So did the rest of Chicago, so Groupon’s site crawled to a slow and eventually crashed.

But Groupon apparently saw this coming and took preemptative measures.

Instead of showing the generic “Server is not responding” or a cutesy little page featuring a plumber, Groupon took advantage of the opportunity to grab more email addresses:

Information about what happened, showing that they were aware of it, and asking for your email address so they can tell you when it’s back. It’s a great example of how to handle a server crash.

Groupon didn’t let a spike in traffic annihilate their business. They used it to their advantage.

I wrote the other day about Posterous’s great apology email. It’s a really great email, but there was no way to easily respond do it. (Ben points out that they had the same message up on their blog with comments enabled.)

I’ve been testing AeroFS as a Dropbox replacement for a couple of weeks. Yesterday, I received an email from one of their founders:

Hey Jeff,

I’m sending out emails to all our early users to get as much feedback
as I can about the AeroFS experience. I hope you’ve enjoyed your time,
but realistically, I know there’s still a lot of bugs for us to fix.
Some of them are obvious (we get crash logs), others less so.

[...blah blah blah...]

But, most importantly: If you have any comments or feedback (things
that work well, or don’t work at all), I’d love to hear them!

Cheers,
Yuri.

I could hit reply and respond directly to Yuri with my thoughts on AeroFS, any bugs I’ve encountered or I could just tell him to screw off.* It’s not revolutionary, it’s not hard, it’s just human. And it’s great.

Not to mention, the P.S. on his email is spot on:

P.S. I know these emails look templated, but I am sending them
manually to each user, I’M ALIVE!!

A nice (human) touch from beginning to end.

* I didn’t tell him to screw off

Posterous apparently had a pretty rocky week.

A Denial of Service attack on August 4th caused the site to slow to a crawl and completely go down for an hour. They used this opportunity to move their servers to a new datacenter which is obviously going to cause even more downtime. But they responded quickly, posting updates on the blog when posting an update made sense. They stayed in front of the story and didn’t even make TechCrunch. High five!

Then today, Posterous’s Cofounder and CEO Sachin Agarwal sent an email to (presumably) all users. It’s a great email. He explained what happened, why it happened and how they fixed the problem for the long term.

But most importantly, he apologized:

While we were certainly frustrated, we know that no one was more frustrated than you. Your website was down, and I humbly apologize for that. Know that throughout these six days, restoring your site and your trust has been our number one priority.

It’s a heart-felt apology from the guy at the top. It’s a good thing.

I hardly ever read (let alone reply to) emails like this. But I’ve been there with sites like Lookit, so I wanted to reply back with some kind of “way to be” or “go get some sleep” or whatever.

But I couldn’t! The email came from no-reply@posterous.com.

Email is a two-way street. Even if it’s just an apology, give your users a way to respond to it.

Every email that comes from Lookit is sent from jeff@playlookit.com. If someone needs to vent, they just hit reply, type their message and send it (in fact, it’s actually encouraged in a lot of the emails that go out to Lookit players). They don’t even have to go to the site to figure out how to get in touch with me. I get constant feedback without even asking.

If you think you’d get inundated with too many replies, or if you’re not comfortable giving out your personal email address, then just create a new one. When the crowdSPRING newsletter goes out to more than 65,000 email addresses, it’s from thecrew@crowdspring.com. Every reply goes to the founders and the marketing department guy.

You’ll get responses, and you’ll get a lot of them. But that’s the point. If your users are giving you permission to email them, the least you can do is give it back.

Apple to AT&T:

They have even fought about wardrobe: When an AT&T representative suggested to one of Jobs’ deputies that the Apple CEO wear a suit to meet with AT&T’s board of directors, he was told, “We’re Apple. We don’t wear suits. We don’t even own suits.”

If the quote is accurate, that’s not “thinking different” or whatever bullshit, hipster mantra the fanboys are chanting. That’s just being a prick.

Bad Connection (Wired) via DF.