With a hat tip to Desmond Shang for his forum post, and another to Kamilah Hauptmann who brought this to Desmond’s attention in the first place, there’s a very interesting blog post from Eric Ries, who has been involved with IMVU regarding listening to your community. I’ve touched upon this before with the example of how Champions Online rectified a situation over limited discounted subscriptions, but Eric’s post is probably a better example because it took IMVU a bit longer to figure out the harsh realities of not listening.
The crux of the issue is that IMVU didn’t listen to their community, made changes that as far as they could see would only have an impact for 0.1% of their community and that everything would be fine. However things weren’t fine, people whom IMVU hadn’t even considered would be interested in some of these policy changes were concerned to such a degree that IMVU was losing both revenue and customers on a scale they hadn’t imagined was remotely likely.
I’m not sure what sort of “illicit” content Eric is talking about, I’ve never used IMVU, I think he’s talking about adult content as he says adults were happy to talk with other adults and be verified as adults, even when they weren’t interested in adult content. Tthere are lessons to be learnt from this article for Linden Lab and they really should pay heed. IMVU you see were chasing the mainstream and by making the policy change they did, they sent a message to their customers, an unintended message, but a message all the same. IMVU customers felt that the platform was becoming a teen-only platform.
How did IMVU end up in this situation? After all they’d been carefully explaining the changes, although they seem to have viewed some of the complaints as “Trolling” and felt that only a very small minority of customers would be disenfranchised. How could it have gone so wrong? Eric explains:
“we violated the cardinal rule. We didn’t listen. More accurately, we made our customers feel like we weren’t listening. And until we could make that right, we kept on hemorrhaging business.”
Linden Lab have most certainly done the above, indeed reading that article I can see several areas where Linden Lab have done exactly what that article says companies shouldn’t do. The adult content changes have been the biggest example of this. Linden Lab have refused to listen to their customers over this one. They still aren’t listening to their customers over this. Where has Cyn been in all of this? She is after all the head of the department and yet she has been conspicuous by her absence and gives the impression of being aloof. Whether she is aloof we don’t know because she hardly ever speaks, it’s left to Blondin to speak and Blondin is following orders from above.
They didn’t listen to their customers over the Openspace fiasco. They weren’t listening to those during the Openspace boom who were saying these islands were not being used as light use, they didn’t listen to their customers over the price rises who said it was unfair to do this when Linden Lab had actively encouraged their sales, they simply didn’t listen.
The new Xstreet forum is another area where Linden Lab have been accused of not listening, and there’s some merit to those charges again. There was also a comment from a Linden that they hoped cooler heads would prevail over last weekend and see the sense of the moves, the cooler heads did not prevail and the impression given was that those who were complaining were considered “Trolls” and unimportant, but as Eric’s post points out, those who don’t post complaints often agree with the wrongly labelled trolls.
Linden Lab have another chance to listen to their customers now, by not merging the main forum with the blog format until such times as the blog format is more user friendly and all round more useful. My hope is that they will do this, keep the main forums as they are for some time yet, allow people to migrate naturally and natural migration is achieved by making the new discussion areas more useful than the old ones.
Linden Lab can’t please all of the people all of the time, nobody expects them to do that either, but when they steadfastly refuse to listen, they alienate communities. IMVU discovered that actually listening to their customers was beneficial, even when they weren’t sure why their customers were complaining:
“It took me a long time to understand that benefit of our product. Most customers couldn’t articulate it; they just knew they were angry that we had ruined it. Except that, from a literal point of view, we hadn’t ruined it. All of the features that enabled that experience were still there. What we had done to ruin it was make our customers feel like they were not welcome anymore. We kept denying that we had done anything wrong, that the features still worked as advertised, and justifying our decisions instead of apologizing. When we finally understood the problem, fixing it was relatively easy. We made a series of very public declarations that IMVU would always support adults, that we appreciated their unique contribution, and that we would always protect the key features that meant the most to them. The fact that pornography was not one of these key features was besides the point. We had summarily turned off one of their features without consulting them and without remorse. Who knew what feature might be next?”
This sums up the feelings of the customers whom I see at Zindra and Blondin Linden office hours over adult content, they feel they aren’t being listened to, they feel that LL show no remorse over the bad policy decisions they’ve made (and this was also true of the Openspace fiasco) and they feel that they aren’t welcomed by Linden Lab anymore but what about those not speaking out? Are there customers who have no interest in adult content who feel Linden Lab are making the place too kid friendly? I have certainly seen people complaining that one of the reasons they came to Second Life was because it was 18+, they don’t want to engage in pixel bumping, but they do want to converse with adults.
Actions are proof that companies are listening, not words, words are largely empty without accompanying actions, will Linden Lab listen to their community or will they continue to take a “Mommy knows best” approach?