New Replies and Comments

As any community manager will tell you, users tend to interact with the community via replies and comments much more so than creating new topics. So we added a new chart that maps out the number of new replies and comments for a given period.

Topic Source

This is possibly my favorite chart of the bunch. In the past two years we’ve been expanding the Get Satisfaction platform to help you reach your customers wherever they may be.

This means your customers may visit the community on the web, on your brand’s website via our Widget, on your Facebook brand page via our Facebook app or even via our API.

For communities who have taken advantage of all of our entry points, it’ll be extremely helpful to see which channel is generating the bulk of the content. Lots of topics being created from Facebook? Well, that marketing campaign paid off! Not enough topics being created from the widget? Make sure it’s displayed prominently on your website!

Active Users

Have you ever wondered who of your customers contributes the most to your community? Someone who creates new topics, but mostly answer others customers’ questions? Now you’ll be able to see who your top 10 most active users are for a given period.

Note that we’ve excluded Employees, Admins, Official Reps and existing Champions from this list. So you can really check out the new helpful faces of your community and thank them by making them Champions for your brand/product!

Active Topics

Last, but certainly not least, we’ve added the “Active Topics” chart. It will show, for the selected period, up to 10 topics that received the most replies, comments and votes.

This will give you a sense of the hot topics in your community, so you can take swift action. It may be a popular idea that you may want to share with the product/marketing teams, or it may be a important bug that got pushed to production and was missed by the QA team. Whatever it is, you want to jump into the conversation and help your customers!

A note about Visitors

After a lot of internal debate, we decided to remove the Visitors chart from the Stats page. For the past few months we’ve been struggling to get you the accurate count of new and returning visitors in a way that was fast to load. So instead of keeping a chart with inaccurate information, we decided to remove it while we work on making it better and more relevant for  you.

How you can get the new Community Stats

We have turned on the new stats to select customers, and will be switching all paid plans over the next coming days. If you have any questions or ideas regarding our Stats, please contribute them on our community!

• Rich, relevant, easy to access online conversations
• Seamless, contextual experience anywhere customers were
• Easy configuration and deployment

So we went to work with our design partners at andCulture and spent the last year building Get Satisfaction Engage, a new widget architecture to help bring community to your company’s website. Though Engage isn’t available to the general public until the end of May, I wanted to share the exciting details with you!

Why Engage?

You know how important it is to have an open conversation with your customers about your brand, to offer them a community where they are encouraged to share their feedback with you. What better place to have a conversation about your brand than on your own website?  In fact, our research shows that the #1 place your customers end up is on your web site!

With Get Satisfaction Engage you can bring community to your website with just a couple of clicks. Choose content blocks that fit your needs, select which topics you want to highlight and pick the colors that match your brand and voilà! We’ll give you a little piece of code to put on your website.

With Engage, your customers will be able to participate in the community without ever leaving your site. They’ll see the hottest topics being discussed, vote on ideas, answer questions, and discover content that will bring them closer to your product, your marketing content, or the help section of your site.

What this means is that all community interactions happen within your website, so the user gets the best of both worlds!

Support
Tired of static FAQ lists that seem to show stale content as soon as they are published? Swap them with Get Satisfaction Engage to show the actual most frequently asked questions from the community.

Not sure you’re ready to let go of content control just yet? We’ve got your back – simply apply a private tag* to your Engage filter and we’ll only show content that has been selected by you!

E-Commerce and Marketing
There’s nothing like word-of-mouth marketing to help users make a purchase decision! With Get Satisfaction Engage you’ll be able to show relevant questions from the community right at the point of sale, without the risk of taking your customers away from the shopping cart flow. All of the community interaction happens in-context, so users can get the information they need without leaving your site.

Product Feedback
Want to get user feedback right from the Product page? Use Get Satisfaction Engage to encourage users to give you new ideas or vote on existing ones.

How does Get Satisfaction Engage work?

Engage is super easy to configure, you just need to follow the easy wizard.

Step 1: Create a new or edit an existing Engage widget

You can create as many Engage widgets as you need, or you can edit an existing one.

Step 2: Select Content Blocks

Add anywhere from 1-6 content blocks to build your Get Satisfaction Engage widget, depending on your needs.

Step 3: Choose Layout Options

As you select content blocks for your Engage widget, you’ll be presented with different layout options. Feel free to move blocks around to highlight content in the most relevant way.

Step 4: Choose Layout Options

This is where you can really configure your Engage widget to include only the content you want. It’s easy to show or hide a certain topic type, prioritize content that has been marked with a certain status, and change the sorting to highlight the most relevant topics. You can also filter content by product* or private tag*.

Step 5: Choose Visual Style

Last, but certainly not least, change the font and colors of your Engage widget to make it look just like the rest of your website.

Step 6: Pick a name and save your configuration

Once you have previewed your configurations and are happy with all your choices, the final step is to save your Engage widget. We’ll give you a little piece of code that you can put in your website.

That’s it!

Here’s what the widget can look like:

One and Done

The most exciting detail about the new Engage widgets is that once you deploy them on your site, you won’t need to touch them again. If you want to change your configurations later on, all you need to do is edit the widget via the same easy-to-follow wizard and your website is automatically updated!

No more need to contact IT and spend cycles trying to get the community content to show up “just right”.

How do you get Engage?

For now, Engage is available to select customers, and will be available to all paid plans May 30th.  In the meantime, you can play with the new Engage widget on our own site. Let us know what you think about it!

* Ability to filter by product and private tags is available only on select plans.
** Ability to remove the Get Satisfaction logo is available only on select plans.

To help you prep for the transition, we posted an article about how to best incorporate Get Satisfaction into your Timeline — 3 Steps to Get the Most Out of Get Satisfaction and Timeline.  We shared three simple steps to best leverage Get Satisfaction in the new layout:

1. Feature your Get Satisfaction app in the top 3 apps (next to Photos).
2. Choose a short, simple, easy-to-understand name for the app.
3. Customize your app icon with a call to action.

The first two should only take a minute or two for you to do.  But if you find yourself scrambling on the third (trying create a custom icon for the Get Satisfaction app tile), you’re in luck!  This is one time when procrastinating really pays off.  Our resident designer, Sarah Berchild, pulled together several sample app tiles that you can use on your own brand page for the Get Satisfaction app.

Here they are (you can right-click to Save As):

Download All: GetSatisfaction-Timeline-Tile-Images.zip (right-click to Save As)

Happy Timelining!

Improved Authorization Setup

If you are setting up a new integration or modifying the settings of your current integration, you’ll now see that you’ll need to go through an OAuth2 authorization flow to configure the integration. Previously when setting up the integration, you entered a username, password, and security token. OAuth2 provides a simpler user experience for administrators, enhanced security, and results in more stability and flexibility.

Up until now, we’ve been using username, password, and security token as credentials to integrate with your Salesforce instance. Although many applications continue to use these types of credentials to integrate with Salesforce, we found it to be particularly problematic for several reasons. First, users found it to be a real pain to dig up the security token. Most users, even administrators, have trouble tracking this down in the Salesforce UI. Second, Salesforce requires users to change their passwords each quarter. Users often (very reasonably) forget that they have to update that password in other downstream systems. In fact, password changes were the number one cause of failures with the Get Satisfaction integration.

With OAuth2, all you have to do is click a button, login to Salesforce, and then click one more button — and you’re done. When you change your password or reset your security token in Salesforce, you no longer need to worry about updating the Get Satisfaction integration.

The New OAuth2 Flow

When you’re setting up your Salesforce integration for the first time, you’ll now see a “Authorize & Activate” button in the Get Satisfaction administrative console. When you click on this button, a pop-up window will appear with Salesforce’s login screen. Login to Salesforce as you normally would (note that if you are already logged into Salesforce you’ll skip this step). You’ll then see a form prompting you to authorize the Get Satisfaction application. Click on “Allow”. The Salesforce window will close. And that’s it! You’re done. If you need to change which user has authorized the app, you can return to the admin section at any time and go through the same steps by clicking on “Change Authorization”.

What is OAuth2?

You might be wondering, what the heck is OAuth2? The short answer is that’s it’s an open standard used for granting authorization between applications. It has a lot of benefits for both end-users and the systems that are trying to integrate using it. You can read more about Salesforce’s implementation of OAuth2 on their blog: Digging Deeper into OAuth 2.0 Salesforce.com.

Learn more about Get Satisfaction’s Salesforce integration

If you’d like to learn more about Get Satisfaction’s integration with Salesforce, this is a great place to start: Get Satisfaction for Salesforce.

To better protect your community data, we’ve enabled industry-standard SSL security for all GetSatisfaction communities except those that use Domain Aliasing. If your community uses Domain Aliasing, we’ve got a solution for you, too.

Beginning March 15, 2012, SSL security will be a requirement for communities with Salesforce integrations. Our Customer Success team is already assisting communities with the Salesforce integration and Domain Aliasing to make this transition. Communities with the Salesforce integration and without Domain Aliasing are already “good to go”.

If you use single sign-on (“Fastpass”), you’ll eventually want to make a minor change to your Fastpass integration in order to reduce login latency. Also, there is some cool technical stuff that we did, so if you’ve got a few minutes you might find it interesting to read to the bottom.

Who Has Time?

At GetSatisfaction, we know that one of the biggest benefits we deliver to our customers is simplicity and ease-of-use. We know that you’ve got a long list of things to do, and wrestling with an overly-complex SaaS product isn’t anywhere on that list. So, whether you’re a local retailer or a Fortune 500 company with dozens of product lines, our goal is to make sure that your GetSatisfaction community should “just work”, and work right, the first time and every time.

That’s why, when we add new features, it’s critical to us that existing communities continue to operate smoothly whether they plan to use the new feature or not. Our recent releases such as mobile support and community localization are good examples of this: transparent to our customers until they are needed, then suddenly very useful.

However, if we Satisfactioneers do our job right, sometimes the improvements are a little too subtle, and we have to write a blog post to let people know about them. In that spirit, today I’d like to talk about a set of changes we’ve made to the GetSatisfaction platform to improve the security of your community.

Are You Sure This Line is Secure?

The most obvious change to the getsatisfaction.com site is that all community pages are now served over industry-standard SSL connections. That means that all data being transmitted between your customers’ (and community admins’) web browsers and our servers is strongly encrypted. This protection is identical to what major financial institutions and retailers use to protect your online banking and shopping experiences from unwanted eavesdropping.

You’ll probably recognize this as the “green means go” URL bar lock-box logo in your favorite browser:

…but if you weren’t looking for it, you might not have ever noticed this upgrade.

For customers or other users who have links to http:// URLs pointing to getsatisfaction.com communities or topics, don’t worry: when we receive such requests we simply “redirect” them to the equivalent https:// URL so quickly that users won’t even notice.

But My Community Uses Domain Aliasing. What About Me?

SSL not only guarantees secure data transmission, it also gives web users certainty about which web site is at the other end of the conversation. (Imagine if the POTUS picked up the Red Phone to talk with the Russian president, only to find out that his conversation was being transmitted securely to Dr. Evil instead!)

To provide this assurance, web browsers will compare the name of the web site they think they are going to (whatever you typed in the URL bar) with the name of the site on SSL certificate presented by the web server at the other end. If the names don’t match, the browser will assume that you are undergoing a spoofing attack put up a truly scary-looking message like this:

For our communities that GetSatisfaction’s Domain Aliasing feature, this creates a sticking point: GetSatisfaction can’t enable SSL for the aliased domain because the getsatisaction.com SSL certificate host name (*.getsatisfaction.com) doesn’t match the host name of the Domain Alias-ed community. What’s more, because of the way that certificate authorities work, GetSatisfaction couldn’t acquire a certificate on behalf of its customers even if we tried!

If you’re the admin of a Domain Alias-ed community and you’re feeling green URL bar envy, don’t worry: we’ve got your back. Our new Domain Alias management tool allows community admins to upload an SSL certificate that matches the name of their aliased community:

Once an SSL certificate is uploaded into this tool, a dedicated, redundant, scalable load balancer is automatically provisioned for that certificate. After the necessary DNS changes are made, all traffic is routed through this load-balancer to provide a seamless SSL-secured, domain-branded community experience:

If you are a Domain Aliasing customer, or are interested in using Domain Aliasing over SSL, please reach out to our Customer Success team for assistance with enabling and configuring this new feature.

What About Those Millions of Topics From the Past?

Our existing historical database of all topics, replies, and comments also proved to be a bit of a wrench in the works. Since we allow users to insert (sanitized) HTML into their replies, our database is littered with millions of references to non-SSL assets that would cause the scary mixed content warning discussed above.

Our solution was to proxy requests for those assets through our own servers. So, if a customer posts an img tag into community topic or reply with this URL:

http://tinyurl.com/7a4w94w

we display it users like this:

https://getsatisfaction.com/sslproxy/SWhAdDNLMG5zdGFuVGlWegLq-3p3__o86YI2deulaLbI4JvuXRfT4JULyU0jlZvh

Our web servers simply decode the incoming URL (the thing with all those nasty letters in it) into the original URL, and pull it from the original server before serving it back to your visitor over SSL. This preserves the facade of SSL-everywhere for your visitor, and the happy green bar stays green.

Implications for Communities With Advanced Customizations

GetSatisfaction allows its customers to have a high degree of control over the look and feel of their community. This can be accomplished through simple customizations such as a custom color palette or background image, or through the inclusion of advanced customizations such as community-specific CSS stylesheets. (In the biz we call any of these sorts of page elements “assets”.)

Unfortunately for GetSatisfaction, browsers really don’t like it when assets served from http:// URLs are sprinkled into pages that have been served over SSL. When this happens, the browser will pop up a scary “mixed content warning” like this:

As much as we don’t like to negatively impact our customers, we really really don’t like to negatively impact our customers’ customers. Since thousands of GetSatisfaction customers take advantage of customizations, we needed to make sure switching over to SSL didn’t generate any such warnings for any of our communities.

That’s where our Customer Success team came in. They identified all customers whose advanced customizations might cause browser warnings when we flipped the switch over to SSL, and then worked with all affected customers to make sure that their customizations would result in the happy “green bar” effect when we launched these changes.

If your community uses advanced customizations, what does this mean for you? Going forward, all communities that assets hosted elsewhere to customize their GetSatisfaction community will need to make sure that the hosting URLs begin with https://, to avoid the type of browser warning shown above.

Implications for Communities with Fastpass Integrations

For communities that use single sign-on (aka “Fastpass”), their sign-on/sign-over process will continue to work. However, because of the redirection support we built for backwards compatibility to the pre-SSL days, the sign-on/sign-over process now takes two round-trips to our servers for most customers rather than one.

This is a minor nuisance that can easily be fixed by using “secure: true” instead of “secure: false” in the Fastpass integration code. Our Customer Success team will be reaching out soon to customers with Fastpass integrations to help them make this change.

Summary

We’re excited to have brought additional security to our communities with minimal disruption – one of a long line improvements lined up for the coming year. For those customers who need to make adjustments to their Domain Aliasing or Fastpass configurations, we’ll be reaching out soon to let you know how to make the required changes painlessly and seamlessly. Until then, your community should continue to operate exactly as it has in the past.