I spent most of this morning dealing with the YouTube web site which does a poor job communicating with its users. They don’t send out weekly or monthly newsletters. Their blog does not have a RSS feed. They do not have a message board where I can get my questions answered. Nobody knows what is going on with the site which leads to a lot of frustration and speculation. Several vloggers do angry videos demanding that problems be fixed.
This illustrates the importance of communicating with your clients or customers. You should let your web site visitors know that you are aware of problems with the site and tell them what you are doing to fix those problems. You should make it easy for web site visitors to find your blog and subscribe. You should send out a newsletter with news and information concerning your web site. And you need a message board where web site visitors can get answers to their questions. Message boards have the additional advantage of being indexed by the search engines and provide a good reason for people to return to the site, i.e. to check for a reply or read a forum thread.
After thinking about YouTube’s lack of communication I came up with several good ideas to address this problem with one of my clients, www.caraccessories.com. I added a blog category for the web site and posted a blog entry on their recent 1-800 number going down. Serveral customers thought their phone lines had been disconnected and this created a very bad impression. Nothing was done to communicate the real nature of the problem to the web site visitors.
Later on today I plan to install the phpBB 2 message board software on their site and start some forums where customers can get their questions answered or find information on the web site.
My clients can get some clue as to what I am learning or working on by reading this blog. I’ll have to make sure they all know about this blog.
