From Dimes to Dollars

Hey everyone, I just wanted to make a quick post apologizing for the lack of unique content the last few days.  I’ve been hard at work finalizing my local entrepreneur group this past week in addition to my usual daily workload, so it’s been very tight.  

But I should be back in full swing again starting tomorrow.  I’d like to begin broadening the topic list a bit from the social media focus as of late with a few articles that relate more directly to all business men and women.  I’ll be going into the thought process behind making decisions and would really like to open it up for discussion.  As always, if there’s anything in particular you’d like to hear about, let me know in the comments, or with the Ask feature.

See you all Monday, cheers!

Ben

If there’s one social media giant that has hit a snag lately, it’s Youtube. Actually, “snag” is a wee bit of an understatement.  Twitter may have received a small amount of flak for their rollout of Promoted Tweets, but like I mentioned HERE, it was done tastefully, only implemented after careful deliberation and listening to lots of feedback.  Youtube, on the other hand, seems to have done completely the opposite, and placed themselves into a figurative minefield of complaints.  There were articles saying there was a new interface in the works, but they were largely speculation, because Youtube had not been open about what the proposed changes were.

We’d be here all day if I were to go over every pet peeve, so let’s just cover a few of the main issues:

Video Response:  The placement of video responses is now buried FAR below the threshold, under the top rated comments.  Drastically fewer users are going to see these responses in such an area of the page, leading to significantly less incentive to post a video response from now on.  Video responses will decline even further because of the difficulty just finding the area to post a response (it is invisible until you click the text comment box).  This can be considered a limitation of one of the main interactive elements of Youtube. 

Rating System:  Switching from a 5-star rating system to an overly-simplified thumbs up/down system means there are less choices for the user.  In the standard star rating system, you could specify more accurately how you felt.  What if you feel a video is only mediocre and doesn’t really deserve a thumbs up or thumbs down?  Chances are, you’ll opt to leave no rating at all.  Again, limiting interaction options equates to less incentive for the user to interact at all, resulting in less time spent on the site, and a sense of disappointment, which should be evident from the continued public outcry.  One other related issue to note is that ratings are no longer displayed next to search results!  If any of my readers can imagine how removing ratings could possibly have any benefit, I’m dying to hear it in the comments…

Comment Rating:  A big incentive for chronic commenters is to not only check back for replies, but also see what their comments were rated, what even the non-responders thought of their convincing argument.  But now those ratings are only for the select few, the very top choices.  For everyone else, you will receive absolutely no feedback on your comment ratings.  ”If people don’t rate my comments, why should I bother rating theirs?”, many will ask.  Yet again we see the cause and effect relating to declining incentive.

“Related”/”Additional Videos From User” Sidebar:  The once-simple, organized sidebar has been replaced with a hideous jumble of videos that are determined by unknown criteria. Sounds like the “Related Videos” section they already had in place; why do we need to go to the top of the page to find the user’s other videos when they grouped so well with Related Videos before?  Even worse, this right sidebar section is not even labeled!  There is no framing anymore either, so it looks sloppy, as if the page has failed to load completely.

What we can LEARN from this:

This is a classic example of a business not listening to their customers.  They implemented changes that they thought people would want instead of asking.  For instance, how often in the past have you heard people complaining, “Man, I just can’t figure out this confusing 5-star rating system. Youtube really needs to simplify this”?  Not very often.  It was Google’s vision to (attempt to) bring things down to toddler intelligence, not the Youtube users, and you can see now the backlash of such a decision.  Remember, it’s not only possible for media giants to make blunders of this magnitude, it’s actually more likely for them because so many stop communicating with their customers once they reach a certain size, gradually becoming out of touch.  No company, no matter how large, is invincible.  I don’t care if you’re worth $10 billion as of today, keep neglecting your customers, keep ignoring their words, and you’re bound to fail.  Think about the vast amounts of criticism, time, and money Youtube could have saved if they had just followed such a basic principle, and reached out to the community.  When I launched this blog, one of the first things I did was ensure I allowed users to post comments from a variety of platforms, and find a theme with a very large, visible button indicating that readers are free to ask questions.  If I’m doing something totally stupid that perhaps I didn’t notice, this gives them the opportunity to set me straight, easily and directly.

So, in a nutshell, how can you find out what your visitors/customers want and get it right the first time?  ASK.  Directly.