Our Facebook App Just Got Even Better

The world is certainly buzzing these days with news of the Facebook IPO announcement. With over 850 million monthly active users, Facebook has clearly established itself as a gathering place for your customers. A lot of your fans and followers are engaging with you on Facebook in meaningful ways. It should be no surprise, then, that over 7.5% of topics created in Get Satisfaction are done so via our Facebook application.  Given this volume, we want to make sure that we continue to offer the best experience for you and your customers to engage in productive conversations in Facebook.

After a lot of hard work and amazing collaboration with our partners over at Involver, we’re very excited to announce several improvements to our Facebook application that are available as of today. These product updates include improved support for different community use cases, the addition of rich analytics, better wall-to-topic integration, and better conversation and recognition tools. See below for the full run-down.

Every community has a different objective.

We’re always amazed at the variety of businesses that use Get Satisfaction to engage their customers. Each one really does have something unique they’re trying to achieve with their community. Given that variety, we’ve added several features that should help you address your customer base in the way that you most need to.

Localized communities in 8 languages: Last fall, we announced support for multiple languages for our web communities. We’re happy to extend that product offering into our Facebook application as well. When you purchase a community for a particular language (e.g. Portuguese), the Facebook application tied to that community will automatically appear in your selected language.

Multi-product communities: Many Get Satisfaction communities are used to support multiple products. In fact, close to 10% of our communities have more than one product configured. For these communities, it’s important that new topics get tagged with the products they’re for so that you can route those topics to the people in your company that are most capable of helping resolve it. You now have the option in your Facebook application to prompt users to select a product as they are posting their topic.  To use this new capability, you need to click the “Enable issue Submission by Product” checkbox in the Get Satisfaction Facebook app settings section.  Your customers will then see a list of products that they can select from when posting new topics.

Product ideation, support, issue reporting, and advocacy communities: Several companies use their Get Satisfaction communities for specific use cases such as product ideation or advocacy.  In your Get Satisfaction Facebook experience, you’ve already been able to focus your customers’ on that particular use case by enabling or disabling topic types.  For instance, if you wanted to focus your customers on product ideation, you might only show the “Ideas” tab.  But often, communities want to focus their customers on one use case while also supporting others.  For instance, they want customers primarily to focus on product ideation, but also allow them to offer praise as well. We’ve added the ability for you to do this by allowing you to select a default topic type for both the topic compose box and the topic browse lists.  To use this feature, you’ll need to specify the “Default New Topic Tab” and “Default Recent Topics Tab” options in the Get Satisfaction Facebook app settings section.  When one of your customers first lands on your Get Satisfaction Facebook app, these topic types will be displayed by default.

Data. Data. Data.

It’s tough to manage what you’re not measuring.  And with so much to manage, social media managers are notorious for being hungry for data!  Historically, we haven’t offered much (if any) analytics and reporting around the actions users were taking in your Get Satisfaction Facebook app. With this release, we’re now capturing detailed action reporting in Google Analytics with drill-down capability to topic and search level data. This allows you to get some key insights into how many users are engaging you on your Get Satisfaction Facebook app, what questions they’re asking, and how much they’re engaging with other users.  To take advantage of this feature, you’ll need to specify your Google Analytics tracking code in the Get Satisfaction Facebook app settings section.

Tracking all user actions: All of the key actions a user takes in your Facebook app are now tracked using Google Analytics. These include searches from the compose box, topic views from intercept search, topic posts, me-too’s, and reply posts among several others. These are all tracked using Google Analytics event tracking, so you can find them under the event tracking section of your Google Analytics dashboard. To enable this, you’ll need to enter your Google Analytics tracking code in the settings of your Get Satisfaction Facebook app.

Drill-down to details: In addition to tracking this rich level of detail with events, we also allow you to drill down into each of these events for additional detail. For instance, you’re now able to drill-down to view the actual search queries that people put in when composing new topics.  Or, you can see which topic types they have been browsing through.  Or, you can even see the individual topics that users are viewing.  It’s an extremely rich data set, so there’s a lot to take action on!

Your customers may start on the Wall, but don’t let the conversation end there.

The average durability (or half-life) of a Facebook fan page wall post is measured in hours. For one of our communities, for example, we found it to be around roughly 7 hours. In other words, a post made on your fan page wall (by you or your customers) is only viewed and active for a matter of hours. By contrast, the durability of a topic posted in your Get Satisfaction community is measured in months or even years. For the same community just mentioned, we found activity on the topic to continue to be on the rise over 11 months later. What does that mean for you?

Basically, that means that you should be very careful in how you invest your time and resources in managing your fan page wall. When you do invest that time, you should try to ensure you’re getting the maximum leverage out of it. Rather than just respond to every wall post with a comment, you should seek out ways to extend the durability of those interactions. One way to do this is to have those interactions occur in your Get Satisfaction community as a topic rather than on your wall as Facebook comments.

Last summer, we released a feature with our partners at Involver that allowed you to create a community topic from a wall post and then automatically direct the user to that topic via a comment on the post. This was a great initial feature offering that we’ve now made even better with this new release. We now direct your users directly into your Get Satisfaction Facebook app to continue the discussion rather than linking them out to the web version of your community. When your users click on the link, they’re kept in the context of Facebook, which is critical because that’s where they first engaged you. Your customers now stay in the context of your fan page, but you get the benefit of highly durable conversations.

    

Advance the conversation.

The conversations between you and your customers (and amongst your customers) is at the core of every community.  With this release, we’ve added several tools to help continue advancing those conversations.

Reply & comment threading: In our web community experience, users are able to comment on other users’ replies to a topic. These comments are nested underneath replies in chronological order and it’s quite easy to follow the thread of conversation. To retain the integrity of these conversations, we’ve brought this same capability to our Facebook app. Users will now be able to view the comments underneath replies. We’ve also added the ability for users in Facebook to comment on replies.

Reply starring: Similar to reply and comment threading, our web experience also allows users to recognize the contribution of others in the community by letting them star replies. With this release, users will now be able to recognize a reply as a “Good Reply” and can view how many other people have done so as well.  Similar to our web experience, when a reply has been recognized by more than 3 users as a “Good Reply”, it’s highlighted at the top of the stream as one of the best responses.

Champion badging: Our Facebook app has recognized employee status for quite some time with an “Employee” badge that appeared next to a person’s name on a topic or reply. We’ve added a similar badging label in Facebook for champions that post topics or replies in your community. You’ll now see the label “Champion” next to a champion user’s topics and replies.

Let us know what you think!

As always, we’re very interested to hear what you think. Feel free to let us know in our community on the web or (even better) in our Facebook app on our fan page!

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Bringing HTTPS to our Community Pages

Increased security for customer data and especially personal information is very important to Get Satisfaction. This week we rolled out a behind the scenes change to our content servers to display communities using HTTPS connections. This means that community data will be encrypted using industry-wide standards when it is exchanged with our servers.

As we explored how to make this change, it was clear that we wanted to keep all of our communities working exactly as they are now, except more secure. This poses an interesting challenge in the case of communities that have a domain alias that masks our “getsatisfaction.com” URL. For domain aliased communities, we will shortly be offering the ability to upload an SSL Certificate to the Get Satisfaction server. Until then, these communities will continue to use HTTP for minimal service interruption.

As an engineering team, we want to stress our continued commitment to security. This change brings us increased confidence in the security of our (and your) customers’ data. Please feel free to chime in on this topic in the developers’ community which is where we will explore the details of the HTTPS change.

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Moderation Tools: Closing Topics

Here at Get Satisfaction we believe that companies should have honest and direct conversations with customers. We built our product around the company customer pact, to encourage people to engage in an open way to discuss the good, the bad and the ugly about products and brands.

But we recognize that even authentic conversations have a natural end:

Problem Solved
Imagine a customer writes on your community to tell you that one of your features stopped working. You ask your engineering team to take a look and launch a fix as soon as possible. A few days pass and folks write in to tell you all is well so you finally mark the problem as solved. You also archive it, because there’s no value in letting this conversation show up in your community’s search results.

Decision Made
There are times a customer will suggest an idea for your product on your community. You review it and, after some constructive back and forth with the customer, decide you won’t act on the suggestion. The customer has provided you with reasons to do it and you’ve explained that it’s not part of your roadmap, so you mark the idea as “not planned”. In this case, you don’t want to archive the topic, because it’s important that other customers understand your rationale for not offering something.

Company Updates and FAQs
Sometimes you just want to announce something to the community, or explain how your product works. While you definitely want these topics to show up in search results – especially if you’re writing FAQs – they don’t really lend themselves to a conversation. If customers have questions about an update or an FAQ, it’s best they create brand new topics that can be addressed individually, with the attention they deserve.

Until today, community moderators didn’t have a way to truly close these conversations. This meant customers who found old and even archived topics could – and generally did – add new comments to a thread that was conceptually closed.

This is why we’re introducing a new moderation tool called Topic Close.

How does Topic Close work?
All moderators will now see a “Close” link with the rest of the moderation actions, on the right column of the topic:

 

A confirmation message will be presented to ensure moderators don’t close a topic by accident:

 

Pronto! The topic is now closed.

 

Note that topic close is also available as a bulk action. Moderators may close several topics at once by visiting the Management View:

 

What happens when a topic is closed?
Closed topics no longer accept new replies, comments or tags. They still accept votes (+1 button) and can be followed/unfollowed. If a topic already had replies, comments or tags, these will not be deleted – we simply prevent new content from being added.

The reply button is also replaced by a banner to properly indicate the topic no longer accepts new contributions.

How can I use Topic Close to create FAQ content?
As any Get Satisfaction moderator knows, once a reply is added to a topic, it is no longer possible to edit its original content. So closing topics will be very helpful if you’re writing content that you want your customers to refer to, but that you also expect to change overtime.

All you need to do is post a new topic with the information you want, and then close it. In the future, if you want to make edits to it, you can simply click the “edit” and “edit subject” links:

 

What if I accidentally close a topic?
No worries! Any moderator can re-open a closed topic by clicking the “Re-Open Topic” button. This changes things back to normal, allowing new replies, comments and tags to be added via the community user interface as well as the API.

I’m an Engineer.  Does Topic Close impact the Get Satisfaction API?
Yes! We have extended our API to accommodate this new feature:

  • Attempting to add a new reply/comment via the API will generate an error indicating the topic is closed
  • Attempting to add a new tag via the API will also generate a similar error
  • Reading topic details will include two new fields:
    • is_closed: true, if the topic is closed; otherwise, false
    • closed_at: present only if is_closed=true. It shows the timestamp of when the topic was closed

What now?
We’re super happy with this addition to the moderation toolbox and we’d love to hear your feedback. Please take it for a spin and let us know how you’ve been using topic close!

 

Posted in Moderation, Product Updates | 3 Comments

Reply and Comment Threading API

For all the developers out there, we recently made some updates to our API to allow threading of replies and comments and comment posting.  In the Get Satisfaction data model, there’s a distinction between “replies” and “comments”.  Replies are the main interaction type that happen underneath topics.  Comments are the interaction that are nested underneath individual replies.  So the hierarchy is: Topics -> Replies -> Comments.

Here’s an example of this type of threading in our web application:

It’s important that we enable the same level of functionality in our API that our web application has to allow developers to create and customize great experiences, so we added the ability to distinguish between these two data types.  This change will allow developers to leverage the difference in how replies and comments are displayed.  In addition, it will allow users of the API to post new comments on replies.

Reply API call to filter out comments

Our current reply API endpoints return all replies and comments in chronological order with no distinction between the two data types.  The conversation is obviously lost here because there is no nesting or threading of comments underneath replies — they all appear as the same thing.  This default behavior on the reply API call can be overridden with a new flag called include_comments.  An example request might be the following:

GET  /topics/[TOPIC ID]/replies?include_comments=false

By including this flag, we will not include comments in the reply response.  In addition to excluding comments, we will now include two additional attributes on the reply object to allow you to easily drill down into the comments nested underneath an individual reply.  These are called comment_count and comments_url.  Here’s an example excerpt:

{ ...

"comments_url": "http://api.getsatisfaction.com/replies/[REPLY ID]/comments",

"comment_count": 2

... }

The above JSON excerpt allows you to see that there are two comments on this reply and it includes a reference to access those comments via another API call.

Comment API call

We added a new API endpoint to allow you to query for comments on a particular reply.  This is a simple called nested under the replies API path.  So, an example call might be the following:

GET /replies/[REPLY ID]/comments

This returns the comments that are nested underneath the given reply.

Posting a new Comment via the API

Given that you can now distinguish between comments and reply in the API, we also added the ability for you to post new comments on specific replies.  This endpoint is similarly nested underneath the replies path.  So, an example would be to do the following:

POST /replies/[REPLY ID]/comments

A simple payload for this POST could be the following:

{"comment":{"company_id":"[COMPANY ID]","content":"This is my new comment."}}

Have questions?

Please be sure to reference our API developer documentation to learn more about how to use the API.  And as always, if you have any questions, please jump into our Developer Community and ask it there.

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Introducing Get Satisfaction Mobile

Get Satisfaction is designed to help you be wherever your customers are — and increasingly that’s on mobile devices!  In fact, the number of mobile visitors to Get Satisfaction communities has more than quadrupled over the past year.  And on a percentage basis, it’s almost doubled (from 8% of visitors last year to 15% this year).  So the need for mobile support is growing fast!

With that in mind, we’re very excited to announce the public beta release of Get Satisfaction Mobile!  Your customers will now experience a mobile optimized web experience when accessing your community from a supported mobile device.  This feature is now available at no additional cost on all paid plans.

Get Satisfaction Mobile

Read on to learn about some of the highlights of the new mobile solution.

I Need An Answer Now!

Context is incredibly important when it comes to designing user experiences.  And mobile is a great example of how dramatically different context can be when users try to access a Get Satisfaction community.

For instance, your customers could be sitting in their car doing a Google search as they’re re-evaluating which diaper brand they’ll buy, sitting at the bus stop trying to report a problem with a social game they just downloaded, or standing in an aisle of a grocery store trying to get a question answered about the store’s return policy.  The context of those interactions is very different than sitting at a desk at the office.  With mobile, you’re at the point of need — and getting resolution to your issue within moments is critical.

We focused the design of the mobile web app to best help on-the-go mobile users reach resolution as quickly as possible with a minimum of typing and clicks:

  • Most relevant topics displayed by default: On the mobile community landing page, users can browse through answered questions, solved problems, in-progress and planned ideas, and recent praise with a quick swipe of their finger.
  • Asking a question is front-and-center: If one of the highlighted topics doesn’t meet your customer’s needs, it’s obvious what they should do next — ask their question! We present them with relevant results (as we do on the web, in our widgets, and on Facebook) to further increase the likelihood that they get an answer without doing any additional typing.  And if they can’t find a similar topic, they can easily create a new one.
  • Joining the conversation is just a button click away: When a user finds a topic that addresses their need, it’s easy for them to get engaged via the action bar that is always present on topic detail views.  User’s can me-too, follow, share, or reply to the topic, keeping them in the loop as the community helps to resolve topics.

Topic Intercept Search ResultsTopic ComposeButton Bar on Topic DetailSocial Share

Nothing to Install

There’s nothing for you or your customers to install to get started.  When a user tries to visit your community from a supported mobile device, we automatically redirect them to the mobile version of your community.

Streamlined Login Experience

Mobile AuthenticationAuthentication is often the biggest point of friction in any user experience.  We’ve tried to minimize that friction by taking a fresh look at the mobile web authentication experience.  We first limited the number of login options to three — Facebook, Google, and Get Satisfaction — as these are by far the most used across all communities.  Second, we made both Facebook and Google true one-click logins by removing the need to prompt users for their email address in an extra step.  We expect this more streamlined login flow to decrease abandonment and increase engagement in communities.

Automatic Capture of Device Information

Mobile Device Information CaptureThe first question that many companies have for users that post topics in their community is what device they’re using. Fortunately, we capture that for you automatically!  We now capture and display user agent information right on the topic in the moderation sidebar.  This allows you to see what mobile device and browser the user posted the topic from, saving both you and your users a step in reaching resolution.

Browser Support & Availability

The mobile web app is available immediately on all paid plans.  The app currently supports iPhone and iPod devices.  We’ll soon be adding support for Android.  Stay tuned for updates as we add new features during the beta period.

What Do You Think?

Grab your iPhone or iPod Touch and give it a whirl by accessing your community or try it out in ours — http://getsatisfaction.com/getsatisfaction.  And as always, let us know what you think in our community!

Posted in General, Product Updates | 18 Comments