Step One: Respect Your Users
Last Thursday night at about 11 p.m., I tried to submit a cool article to Mixx, but the system spit out an error message:
“Sorry, the URL you are attempting to submit is not valid on our system.”
Say what? I found the help page and followed the link to notify Mixx what happened, and then forgot about it.
At 9:04 a.m. on Friday, I got an email from Will Kern, who’s the Director of Product Management for Mixx. Will explained that the URL was flagged by the third party who filters their links. Will’s email was intelligent, detailed, and respectful. He explained why I couldn’t submit that URL, and what he was going to do next:
I am going to contact our 3rd party and see if I can resolve the issue. As soon as I hear back from them I will let you know. In the meantime, please feel free to submit anything else and I appreciate you making us aware of your issue so we can get it resolved.
At 1:57 p.m. on Friday, Will email again to let me know the URL was a “false positive” to be flagged, that they’d correct it that night, and that I’d be able to submit the article by the next morning. Sure enough, they did … and I did.
How’s that for customer service? Mind you, I’m not paying Mixx a dime for anything. The attention to detail and quick response is great, and separates Mixx from the social media crowd. I can’t imagine getting such quick and helpful emails from … well, you know who.
Step Two: Reward Your Power Users
This morning, I was one of many Mixx users who received an email with this news:
Because you are one of the most active and valued members of the Mixx community, we wanted to let you know that you’ve been promoted to Super Mixxer status! And while this doesn’t come with a monetary gain, it does give you access to a special feature not available to the entire community.
Me? A Super Mixxer? How cool is that?! Turns out it’s very cool. I’m able to use the brand new “Related Content” feature, a privilege I promptly tried. I found this story submitted by “Bdog2g2″ called “20 Things I Wish I Had Known When Starting Out in Life.” That has a similar theme to this article I submitted a couple weeks ago, which is titled “12 Things I Learned By 42 That I Wish I Knew At 22.” So, I connected them … easy as can be. Now it looks like this:
What’s the big deal? How about this:
- As a (so-called) power user, I can now help improve the site by linking any two pieces of related content together, even if I didn’t submit either one. This makes the overall site experience better — lots of related content in one place, no need to look for other angles on a story and other opinions.
- Likewise, I can clean up the site a bit if similar stories get past the dupe content checker.
- Most importantly for the purpose of this post, Mixx is rewarding its most loyal users with the ability to help shape how the site is used by the whole community. Nice touch!
Mixx is getting a lot of buzz lately, and that’s sure to continue if they continue to respect and reward their users. That’s how you build a devoted online community.
