Todd Sampson

Everyone loves me. Everyone loves my business and products. What’s more, everyone loves everything that I do. I. Am. Awesome.

So, aside from sounding like Barney (wwNPHd) from How I Met Your Mother, the above is an example of someone’s ego defense mechanisms completely insulating their id. While this state of delusion can make the world a nice place to inhabit — being completely id driven is how children live after all — it can be disastrous for a business.

Every company must deal with Brewster’s Law of Online Community Management:

“In every online community there lurks a small but vocal minority of attention-seekers. These folks are ready to pounce on any change, brand it as a Sign of the Coming Apocalypse, and announce their intentions to leave in a loud, angry huff. The only problem? They never actually leave….”

While these people definitely exist, there are many more users that criticize because they actually want the product to get better. How do you determine which type of user has given the suggestion and fairly judge the idea?

I propose that we start “Turning Oranges into Apples”. In other words, flip the negative feedback you receive 180 degrees before adding it to your potential To Do list. Criticism for not having a feature is converted into positive feedback for having the feature in place. Instead of “I hate that you don’t have [XYZ] on the site” you list “I really loved that you added [XYZ] to the site.”

Turning Oranges into Apples does three things for you:

1. It separates the negative emotion of the critique from the idea itself.
2. It truly lets you “compare apples to apples” as the old saying goes. The benefit of the feature can be judged against other ideas without bias. Which keeps you from over/under-prioritizing a feature based on the way it was presented.
3. It protects your collective team id — which makes life nicer and keeps everyone from thinking all of your users are [insert favorite explicative(s) here] idiots.

Since having an engaged audience is becoming more critical to business success every day, anything that we can do to improve the process should be very valuable. Do you have any other life-hacks for dealing with user feedback? Please share them in the comments.