191: Get and use granular customer feedback

My friend Charles Benaiah writes a daily substack that’s both fun to read and insightful. In a recent post with the lovely title “No vomit in Narnia” he quotes David Carey, then president of Heart, as saying “we throw away 100 stories for every story we publish. For every picture you see, there are thousands you don’t.”

This reminds me of an experience back at Kiplinger. The editors for The Kiplinger Letter do lots of work on a wide range of topics, then they take all that information and boil it down to a concise, crisp, 4-page letter. They refine it further by writing each paragraph and each line in a particular style, and they highlight the key points. It’s easy to skim.

I’ve never made a movie, but I’ve heard that there’s a ton of film on the cutting room floor. ChatGPT tells me it can be anywhere from 10 to 100 times as much as the final product – so for a two hour film they might film anywhere from 20 to 200 hours of footage.

A good product is all in the curation. What’s the story, and what contributes to telling that story effectively.

The internet has become the repository of all the junk that didn’t make it into the curated publication.

Charles points out the genius of Facebook, which is to allow the reader to curate his own information with the like button.

This conjures an image in my mind. On one side you have the consumer picking and choosing what he wants, and on the other you have the genius expert picking and choosing what the consumer should want.

Ironically, Facebook played this both ways. On the one hand, users could affect what content they see by their likes and comments and attention, but on the other hand, Facebook famously decided what information people should not be able to see, and censored things they thought were better left unseen and unread.

Where are you on this continuum? Are you the paternalistic editor who decides what news is fit to print, or do you just give people what they want, so long as you can monetize it?

You’re probably somewhere in between, and honestly, I’m not here to lecture you on that subject. In my professional life I focus on how to get things done, and I don’t quibble with people about their philosophies.

I’m discussing this topic today to remind you that you should be getting and reviewing customer feedback. How are you doing that?

Do you have like buttons on your articles? Why not? You don’t have to show the answers.

I wrote a science fiction book for children a few years ago and I was concerned about the pace. I didn’t know if the sciency stuff was distracting from the story, so I asked my daughter and her friends to read it and to put a plus or a minus on each page to indicate whether or not they were enjoying it – at that moment.

Unfortunately, we usually can’t get that level of analysis, and I don’t know why. Why doesn’t Kindle tell authors where people stop reading a book – that is, where they’ve lost interest? Why doesn’t Spotify tell you where people stop listening to a podcast?

Today I’d like to challenge you to think about ways you can get more granular feedback from your customers to fine-tune your product. I have some ideas myself, but I think it’s good to go through the exercise.

Give it a try and let me know what you come up with. Or give me a call and we can chat about it.