[enntwo]

Regardless of who's side you fall on, I think this is a pretty good example of why allowing public comments is a bit of a dangerous move.

(Clearly the more dangerous move here was the price hike, but I do not know the internals of the company that led to the decision, or the interest that it was in, so I will not comment on that so much.)

It is tough to imagine them recoverving from the sort of mob-rule that has formed in that comment thread, even if they restore current pricing plans. So much doubt was created amongst the users, which of course spread to twitter, here, and others, and you can see the discussion clearly degrade from concern to rage.

Public interaction with users can be helpful to show a personal side of the company and try to show a strong effort for support/interaction, but do not forget that this risk exists. As with anything, use with caution.

[hga]

I'm not sure you're right.

The backlash would be expressed elsewhere, here at least it's in a place they cannot afford to ignore.

Their actions going forward, e.g. if they purge the posting with the links to competitors, will tell us a lot about them and how they're going to deal with this.

Also note this could be part of an internal faction fight, one faction who's against this move may have wanted this so that they can show this immediate and detailed feedback from current customers to those in the company who put this in place.

In general, I find most "supress information and communications" strategies to not work well, and this is ever more true the more we build our communications infrastructures.

"The truth is out there" and pretending otherwise is likely to be futile.

[enntwo]

My main argument is now that they have allowed public comments and such backlash occurred, they cannot feasibly double back on it. Any purging of comments would only further feed the fire and damage there PR as you mentioned.

I don't believe that the avoiding the creation of a public forum on your service's site is surpessing information and communications though, but I will agree that once one is made it must be dealy with judiciously and should not have its contents purged or modified after the fact just because they are not in the companies best interest. This would only hurt further, and from what we have seen so far here, ZenDesk has left all the comments intact.

I also don't think such a backlash would be felt if originated from elsewhere, even from many other sources. The main issue here is that all of the users who are first discovering the issue have no time to think about how it truly effects there business, but are only tossed into a frenzy of doubt and anger.

Many of the users would not know about the complaints and discussions on twitter, and there competitors would not be getting so much attention if it were not directly linked and discussed on their page.

Of course I cannot know how much different it would be if they did not provide such a public discussion area, but it seems now they have provided a universal entry point into the user-mob that they must actually maintain.

[ahoyhere]

We allow public comments on our SaaS blog, but we don't use things like UserVoice for these reasons…

If the issue is a minor annoyance, people will be minorly annoyed. They will probably write support; we'll handle it; they'll get personal service; everybody's happy.

Until they see that other people have it too, and have the option to "vote it up," etc. That way, a minor annoyance a person would live with -- and be happy that you fixed -- becomes a major gripe.

Basically, your customer's interaction should be with you, not other customers, unless other customers are part of the "features" of your product. Because other customers will misrepresent, inflame, etc., meanwhile the initial irritated customer will have his/her first interaction with a tool, not a human being.

The moment they interact with a respectful person AT the company, they will calm down. Not so with a comment form.

Basically, it's an argument that goes both ways :)

[hga]

Indeed, it most certainly goes both ways.

But at a certain point in its growth if a company doesn't maintain their own forums alternative ones that they don't have any control over or maybe even knowledge of will spring up. And that will happen instantly in the case of an atrocity like this one.

"Keep your friends close and your enemies closer." If you pull a move that turns a lot of the former in to the latter, well, that bit of advice is probably all the stronger.

Of course, you need to actually respond to them if it's to be of any good and that doesn't seem to be happening as of yet.

[ahoyhere]

I totally see your point.

The other school of thought says, though, that if there's not a single point for them all to coalesce around, the uproar won't happen.

If you're determined to screw your customers, of course, nothing will stop them ;)

[adamhowell]

Not to mention it gives TechCrunch a permalink of juicy, pissed off comments to write a post about.