UserVoice offers a hosted way to harness the innovation and ideas of customers and potential customers that replaces email.
San Francisco based UserVoice improves the signal-to-noise of user opinion by allowing the moderation of the ideas of one person against the opinions of the many. UserVoice allows users to voice opinions, suggestions, and complaints. The video above demonstrates how it works (it’s difficult to pigeon hole) but think focus groups for companies that can’t afford focus groups, with elements of a forum and even Digg style voting thrown in for good measure.
For companies, UserVoice offers an open and transparent process for customer feedback to any company. The system also allows site owners to ask the community more directed questions (e.g. by a poll) about how users like a new feature or what they think of a specific idea.
I first saw UserVoice when I interviewed Guy King for CushyCMS (post here), King loves the service and although I didn’t video it, he spent 5 minutes showing me how they were using it. It’s always a good sign when people not involved with the company spontaneously evangelize a product. CushyCMS’s UserVoice page here and the official demo page for UserVoice can be viewed here.
The service is completely free during the public beta. UserVoice competes with SalesForce (IdeaExchange) and GetSatisfaction.
I was invited to participate on the Dell IdeaStorm site before it went live, and have monitored the progress ever since.
Collaborative innovation is an interesting concept when combined with enabling online participation and interaction tools.
However, when content ranking is entered into the equation, protecting and/or promoting vested interests seem to become the primary focal point for public participants that hide behind cryptic user names.
Sometimes bigots and bullies attempt to silence a dialog that’s contrary to their position. You quickly see both the best and worst of human nature bubble to the surface.
That said, I’ve registered for the UserVoice service, and will apply it on one of my websites. IMHO, the potential of harvesting ideas — from stakeholders globally — is a worthy cause for any social media designer.
I would like to throw in IdeaScale (a service we are launching in beta tomorrow) also into the ring
http://www.ideascale.com
(Although I cannot get TC to cover it
Amazing how so many of us have products coming out at the same time.
Market-share battle in 5…4…3…2…1…
Blast. Even I had the exact same idea. Curse you UserVoice and IdeaScale!!!
Nice work, BTW.
Hey Vivek & IdeaScale – there’s plenty of space to go around.
Welcome to the party
@Marcus – Good times – Hey are you guys going to bouncing around in Web 2.0 Expo? Would love to meet you guys!
Get Sat. is presenting too.
What an innovative idea.
Literally registered and created a page in minutes
http://seo.uservoice.com/
http://www.collabandrate.com/ was doing this last year. However, they seem to have fallen off the face of the earth.
We drew up designs to integrate the same type of service integrated into our web 2.0 help desk software- which is in development to support our launch of http://www.CleverTools.com. It is cool to see some other people out there doing the same thing!
Very nice service. Great job!
Hey UserVoice… you owe me beer!
@Vivek — Sorry, I won’t be at Web 2.0 Expo, but Rich may be going. I’ll check with him in the morning.
@Guy — How about one for you & one for Beven too!!!
Thanks for giving Duncan the “tour!”
Marcus
Twitter: @marcusnelson @uservoice
Thanks for the post! Now if I can only get Mark or someone over at TC to setup a UserVoice page for CrunchBase I’ll be content
Richard White
Founder, UserVoice
We at BrightIdea.com have been doing this for the past 8 years. Good to see more companies embracing Ideation and Innovation which validates our market. I would mention that collection of ideas is the easy part. Making those ideas into reality is the where the real work begins. Although we provide an end to end innovation pipeline mgmt software, we believe the innovation space deserves more consideration and attention from large companies whose existence will ultimately depend on how they manage innovation.
China stone company in this site http://www.stonepages.cn
We’ve been trialling Uservoice for three weeks and it’s indeed an excellent and very easy way to add feedback and user voting to an existing site.
The integration is a breeze (just some javascript code in your header) and we like the UI a lot. You can see the integration on our pages as a blue ‘feedback’ tab on the left (use link above).
The guys behind it are figuring out their pricing structure at the moment and need to work hard on this and some of their communications. They’ve been having teething problems with their outreach e-mails but this is a minor criticism of an otherwise great application.
Its really good, Im testing it for two of my sites, http://tvradionet.com and also http://videomilk.com who are both video sites and its working really good until now, sometimes it go off because of the beta thing but the great video sites are working really good.