It’s a beautiful thing when companies listen to their users. There is a time to listen and a time to ignore. The key is knowing the balance. Electronic Arts (EA) learned this was a time to listen. Seth Godin recently wrote an article about Ignoring Your Critics and to a degree he is correct. Let’s look deeper on when you should listen to your customers or readers (if you have a blog) and when you should ignore them.

The Example Problem: Piracy

EA implemented an online authorization system on some of their games to combat piracy. I do not think anyone can blame a company being concerned about piracy if the piracy levels become too high. I do not think anyone can blame a company for attempting to stop piracy if the company begins to lose significant income from piracy. However, if the protection they implement frustrates customers to the point of not wanting to purchase your products, this is when company owners should listen to their customers and make a decision.

Same goes for bloggers or site owners if they make significant changes to their site. When a site owner unintentionally makes changes their audience does not like, the site owner should sit back for a minute and listen to their readers (as in be aware of their thoughts).

Note I said listen (be aware). I did not say implement.

The Important Decision: Choice

Let’s take a look at Seth’s article again because he makes an excellent distinguishing point:

The critics are never going to be happy with you, that’s why they’re critics. You might bore them by doing what they say… but that won’t turn them into fans, it will merely encourage them to go criticize someone else.

This is very true. Critics love to criticize. This is one of the reasons why, when I write a critical piece, I try to go back and revisit the situation to see if the situation I wrote about is the same. If things have changed, I update my readers and I will definitely shift from being “the critic” to “the fan”. A good example of that is my latest Wayne Sutton article.

The key here is to understand the difference between your critics and people who have legitimate points about things you might be doing wrong. Sometimes negative criticism is correct, which is why I make the difference between being aware and implementing.

Seth makes another good point: Ignore fans too.

Your fans don’t want you to change, your fans want you to maintain the essence of what you bring them but add a laundry list of features. You fans want lower prices and more contributions, bigger portions and more frequent deliveries.

If you think of your favorite companies or sites you can relate to this. You might want your favorite pizza place to lower prices, deliver faster, and add specific toppings to their offerings. These requests might actually cause the company to lose money but hey, you want it right?

So who do you listen to according to Seth? Sneezers.

You should listen to the people who tell the most people about you. Listen to the people who thrive on sharing your good works with others. If you delight these people, you grow.

Now let’s bring this back to EA – who did they “listen” to and how can you learn from their experience?

Negative Criticism Sometimes Means You Screwed Up

When EA released Spore last year, they sold over a million copies. The game was also on the top of the piracy charts. Could they have contributed to their own problem? Why should a customer legally purchase the game and frustrate themselves when an option is available to download the game and play in peace? EA even released a de-authorization tool to help ease their customers. The situation was that bad.

This is when a company owner, site owner, etc. should stop and listen…carefully. EA went too far, frustrated their customers and broke their trust. Looking at what everyone else was going through I opted not to play the game at all since I was happily playing World of Warcraft stress free. The critics were right in this case. The method EA implemented was not reasonable and they made their piracy situation worse.

Learning from their mistake, a Sims 3 online authorization will not be implemented. In business (and life) there will be mistakes. Learning from them is a key to success.

Tying it All Together

I think a company/site owner should be aware of what is being said about the company’s products and services. This does not mean the immediate reaction should be to bend over backwards and implement every suggestion because it is impossible to please everyone. However, in some cases “critics” can be right. In the age of mobility and high travel it is not unusual for people to have multiple installs of a game. For example, on a desktop and a laptop or the desktop at home and a desktop at work. Multiple installs does not necessarily equate to piracy anymore.

The key here is that even though EA added the online authorization it still did not stop piracy, it increased it. So why bother going down that path again? There is a difference between users wanting features that does not increase your profit or are not inline with your current goals (ignore those) and users complaining about being able to play the game they purchased (listen to those).

Your users and readers will let you know if you royally screwed up. Learn from the mistake and do not repeat it. I’m glad EA will not be implementing online authorization and because of that…I’m pre-ordering Sims 3.

And that is an example of a critic turning into a fan.