Crowdsourcing and more...

2 subjects. Crowdsourcing, with the story of how 2 sites so similar could be so different, and why you shouldn't abandon an idea when it doesn't work right up.

I recently tried out ideascale.com, which put simply is a feedback tool for your website. It didn't get any attention whatsoever. Today, I tried uservoice.com and had feedback within an hour of installing it.

These two websites operate so similarly, but the use slightly different words to put across what they are doing. IdeaScale banks on the concept of 'sharing your ideas' to make a website better. UserVoice lets you 'leave feedback'. The sites are so similar that I wasn't 100% sure which one I was looking at, save a few cosmetic differences, however I'm very certain that UserVoice performs much better simply because it uses words that customers identify with.

I was ready to give IdeaScale the flick completely because it had not created any worthwhile reason for keeping it on my site. I wasn't looking for an alternative, I just figured it wasn't something my customers wanted to do. Then I stumbled across uservoice.com being used on tweetdeck.com, and the floating sideways feedback bar grabbed me at once. It was unobtrusive, but it showed me that the people behind the site were looking for comments from customers.

Next time you say "We tried it, it didn't work" don't forget that you only tried it one way. Times change, and different people bring different versions of the same idea, and sometimes all it takes is a subtle difference in what you are doing to make a very different impact.

I'm going to be using Feedback alot more on my sites, because ultimately, the more you listen to visitors, and the more valuable you make a site to visitors, then the happier your visitors will be and more likely they are to return. Happy visitors equals a happy site.

I'm off to add Feedback to another site!