You're Doing It Right: 4 Authentic Company Voices

Brand tone of voice: this is the way a company sounds as an entity. Businesses may not be people in the sense that they should be able to contribute huge amounts of money to political causes, but they do have a group voice, and they matter. Companies like MailChimp are renowned for having distinctive, engaging corporate voices, but who else is doing it right?

Planet Fitness: Judgment Free Zone

Known for being the economical option in gym memberships, Planet Fitness has taken a solid stance with their brand tone of voice. And what's more, they haven't backed down from a position that has some more serious health enthusiasts miffed (my more athletic friends among them).

Rather than trying to compete with more robust gym offerings, Planet Fitness targeted the large majority of us who would rather watch the Biggest Loser than re-enact it. Across all of their efforts, the Planet Fitness voice emphasizes a sense of belonging over anything else.

And it's a wise choice—the message "you are not alone" is much stronger than "you are not healthy enough yet." And urban-cowboy agency Red Tettemer O'Connell + Partners applied the verbal rough edges that resonate with those of us who are well into the double digits of body fat.

But did it work? According to the New York Times, absolutely: membership has increased 25% in a year and female members in particular are three times the industry average.

MakeLoveNotPorn.tv: Tagalicious

When it comes to finding content with verbal precision, Experience Goddess Oonie Chase nailed it. In an industry that's traditionally ignored the nuance of human sexuality, MakeLoveNotPorn.tv aspires to offer us more.

Previously, options for finding erotic content included: search based on sex act terms or stereotypical roles, recommendations from others, looking at a few tiny scene captures, and good old trial and error. In short, the majority of pornography (and ways of finding it), relied upon objectification rather than something deeper.

Since MLNP took an unconventional approach to providing erotic video, it makes perfect sense that they took a likewise unconventional approach to finding it. The team created language around this material not previously available, using tags like: tender, talkative, joyful, married, and sensual. When's the last time you saw that in the back room of your local sex shop? It's truly inspiring to see an industry building a sophisticated language around what was mostly grunting and pointing before.

Subaru: Experience Over Status

This car company may just be the only one whose ads I a) don't hate and b) remember. They've been putting out some great commercials that do something wonderful: they don't talk about features. Hell, a good portion of screen time doesn't even focus on the car itself, but rather the environment in which the car exists. What matters to Subaru owners is what experience they can have with their vehicle, not the car itself.

It's like they took the Volkswagon approach of contextualizing what makes their product great one step further. Sometimes, what you don't say speaks louder for your brand than what you do say.

American Cancer Society: Official Sponsor of Birthdays

I wish I could do a slow clap for that tagline. I mean really, it's an incredible challenge to take a topic that's deeply difficult and turn it into something hopeful that doesn't sound saccharin. I believe credit for that feat goes to The Martin Agency.

I love this example of brand voice because it isn't easy. MailChimp's playfulness isn't necessarily easy to create, mind you, but being funny and off-beat is a little more natural than being authentically inspiring as well as calm and approachable. To replicate the feeling of having someone who understands what a cancer patient is going through in copy tone is an achievement to tip your hat to a few times.

Voices like these make me feel happier when it comes to writing copy for the purpose of selling something, whether it's an idea or a product. I've enjoyed creating web content partially because most of the time, someone intentionally visits a site with purpose as opposed to having an ad thrust upon them. But when done well, advertising can be an art—and one that's worthwhile for everyone.

Now what I'm still trying to figure out is why cat supply companies haven't capitalized on the fact that they may be the only industry that could legitimately leverage cat videos to sell a product.

Pivotal Tracker vs Sprintly: A PM Perspective on Agile Tracking Tools

I've written before about the benefits of being an early adopter and generally willing to try new tools or methods, but I wanted to get tactical concerning a recent project management tool choice.

My team at Inovāt has been working on a really exciting project for a client in the education space. What we're building could make a huge difference for teachers by providing tools not currently available to them online. It's a sizable project with an aggressive deadline and plenty of unknowns—which is why we decided to use agile methodologies.

With this in mind, we went looking for the right tool for collaborating as a team. We wanted something that would help us:

• Prioritize and track specific feature development and design.
• Understand what was completed, what was currently being worked on and what was up next—and report that progress to our client in the least time-consuming way possible.
• Recognize and quickly resolve roadblocks.
• Make sure nothing got lost in the process of rapid iteration.
• Determine if the project was on schedule for an on-time launch.

I had experience using Pivotal Tracker, but I wasn't married to it (nor was my team), so we looked around for comparable options. Serendipitously, one of our designers stumbled upon Sprintly while browsing an inspiration site, and I was immediately intrigued.

Since Sprintly is the new kid on the block, I wanted to do some research on how it stood up to what Pivotal offered. I had a hard time finding much in the way of comparisons from project managers, so now that I've used both,  I wanted to offer what insight I can.

Pros: What They Do Well

Sprintly

• It's really, really ridiculously good looking. Seriously, Sprintly is easy on the eyes, and when you have to look at a tool all day, that's a plus.
• Daily digests. Receiving one email at the end of the day summarizing what's happened provides a nice overview to stay in the loop.
• Involving non-agile masters. Sprintly paid attention to detail when it comes to bringing in agile n00bs. Stories are structured to help anyone adding them to account for the three critical parts (who, what, why), though that can become awkward to write and repetitive to browse. They also allow bug reporting via email.
• Assigning sub-tasks to individuals. Instead of ownership only at the card level, Sprintly lets you assign sub-tasks within a card to others.

Pivotal Tracker

• Easy to self-orient. Pivotal has one view and only one view, so there isn't any confusion about where you are and what you're viewing. The downfall of this, of course, is losing the ability to fully limit/customize what you're looking at.
• Epics. I thought we could live without epics, but I was wrong. Pivotal's epics allow us to upload a wireframe or comp that spans many stories in one place without any complicated linking.
• Organizing by searching. The panel method allows me to search for a term, then drag that item to the top of the backlog/icebox quickly and easily. Sprintly's searches occur within their silos, making drag and drop... well, a drag.
• Pricing. Pivotal has pricing tiers that charge by the month. For us, it was just $18/month for up to 7 users on 10 projects (more than enough for us).

Both

• Cancel at any time. 'Nough said.
• Pinging others in comments. Being able to notify someone with a simple @ comment is really practical, and Tracker just added it as a feature. Now if only someone would create a log of my @ comments so I made sure to respond to all of them...

Cons: What Could Be Better

Sprintly

• Search should be AND instead of OR. This is a big shortcoming of the product and one that you might not immediately pick up on. When looking for something tagged "adjective 1" and "adjective 2," you will get back results that have one of those tags attached to them—not results that have both associated with them. This became a problem for us when we wanted to look into a set of features for a phase of work ("administrator"+"phase 1"). You can use boolean search to get around this, but it's an unreliable hack. Unfortunately, this is a pretty big undertaking and might be a while before it's up and running. In Pivotal, you can do an AND search by just writing the two words you're looking for, but it's missing the predictive tag names that Sprintly offers.
• Velocity and epics. Ironically enough, Sprintly doesn't advocate for the use of sprints and traditional agile (instead promoting a Kanban approach). For my needs, this became a problem pretty quickly. My team is blissfully self-motivated, so the notion of taking on next highest priority work once a sprint's work is complete (or stalled by a client) didn't need to be dictated. Sprints, however, help us communicate and plan with a client concerning expectations and made them more comfortable than a "we'll keep working as quickly as we can to get things done."
• Finding the right view. At first I was excited to escape the confinement of the single-view Pivotal prescribes, but as it turns out, there are simply too many views and it can be difficult to figure out where I should be and what I'm looking at. I eventually figured things out for the most part, but my team was exasperated by the navigation issues.
• Pricing. While projects are unlimited, Sprintly charges by the seat: $14/month. That was a $66 difference against Pivotal's price and just a little too rich for our small shop blood.

Pivotal Tracker

• Auto-saving. I have to click "save" on everything. While I do get a warning if I try to close my tab without saving, I don't get a warning when I navigate over to another card or panel. I desperately want auto-saving.
• Multi-tag searches. These three searches all return a different number of results: "foundation baseline," "foundation and baseline," "foundation, baseline." If searches leveraged existing labels (like Sprintly does), results might be more predictable.
• Epic checklists. I use epics to manage design work since this effort isn't at the story-level but rather a user path level. I can upload files to an epic, but I'd really like to have checklists at the epic level for managing design and manual, pre-release QA tasks.
• Aesthetic. Usability is (mostly) there, but I just wish Tracker was a little more sophisticated.

Both

• User communities could be better. Sprintly is using UserVoice as their community and while they're actively responding there (and via Twitter), UserVoice isn't necessarily the best community on the market.Pivotal Tracker has a Get Satisfaction community, but sadly it's not super active and it's fairly hidden—instead of using the typical Get Sat "Feedback" tab that persists across a site/app, you have to click on "Help," then "Got a feature request or suggestion?" It's really too bad they're not leveraging the full power of Get Sat and their customer community.

• Need responsive design to leverage views. As a product owner, I want to fill a giant screen with my stories to organize cards. Sprintly currently has a maximum 1000 px width and it's just not enough. Pivotal leverages panels within a single dashboard view, but this tends to get a bit cumbersome.
• Curating client views. I'd love to loop in my clients directly to our workspace—but I want to have a good amount of control over what they can see and interact with. Sprintly allows observer seats, but these users can see everything a full user can, just not interact with it. I want to dictate what a client can see.
• Easy imports/exports. Sprintly's export was something I needed my dev to help out with and it wasn't simple to scrape everything we needed into a single file. Importing was only available by following a strict format via email (and you weren't notified if it wasn't right; the stories just didn't show up). In Pivotal, I can easily export and import, but they limit imports to 100 items, presumably for speed concerns (but a huge pain in the neck at the beginning of a project).
• Cross-checking card repetition. It would be ideal if as I'm creating a card, I could be prompted with "Hey, looks like that might already exist. Is this it?" In a tight-knit team, it's not essential, but it would definitely be nice to have.

Four weeks into using Sprintly, my team decided to switch to Pivotal Tracker. It's not sexy but it is simple, and we think epics in particular will help us balance design and development.

Make User Feedback a Real Conversation

Embracing a healthy user feedback community as you develop a product says you're serious about meeting user needs, and it can hands-down make the difference between a flourishing product and a mediocre one.

Ever since I beta tested GatherContent's system, I've been enamored with trying out new products and giving user feedback to the companies behind those creations. With GatherContent, I've basically become the definition of a brand champion.

The product is great (and it just keeps getting better all the time), but what really got me invested—what keeps it top of mind as something I regularly advocate for among other content strategists and designers—is that the team embraced me as a valuable contributor to their development.

Did they implement all of my ideas? Of course not. Hell, at some point I probably asked for a unicorn to dance across the screen.

What they did do is acknowledge all of them, giving me insight into how the product is being developed and why. I was invested and I loved it. I happily became a paying customer when they transitioned to a subscription model.

This month, I've been trying out another web app, Sprintly, for agile project management, and it's showing a lot of promise (besides being the best looking PM tool I've seen to date). And after my experience with GatherContent, the presence of a customer feedback community was part of my decision to try it out. While the app itself has a lot going for it, their user feedback community has left a lot to be desired.

Not all feedback engines are created equal.

First, let me say that having a customer community at all is a huge improvement over more traditional methods of customer service. That said, building a community around improving user experience should itself be a solid user experience.

GatherContent used Get Satisfaction as their customer feedback community, and while it’s not a perfect tool, it provided the features necessary to facilitate our productive dialog. Giving feedback comes in four forms:

• Ask a question
• Share an idea
• Report a problem
• Give praise

These are the most common ways I want to interact with a product I'm using, and keeping it all in one community—where employees and customers alike can respond and discuss items—is beautifully simple and effective.

I've never been a fan of being forced to search community-supported forums for answers because they're usually bloated and difficult to parse, but Get Satisfaction has provided thoughtful paths for getting exactly what I need out of an interaction.

UserVoice, on the other hand, differentiates between types of interactions, creating a disparate community in the process:

• Contact support submits an email (moving a conversation about problems to individual inboxes instead of the community, where everyone could learn from a single conversation)
• Give feedback is a way to submit ideas within the format of "I suggest you..." Most people ignore the prompt.
• The Knowledge Base provides topics and FAQs that help you get up and running and troubleshoot. Unfortunately, several of these articles are repetitious (e.g., the categories FAQs and Getting Started cover many of the same issues in separate and slightly different documentation articles).
• There's no encouragement to provide praise. Sad. There are lots of good things to be said about Sprintly so far!

Let your customers help you.

I first realized that my ability to communicate in Sprintly's UserVoice community was limited when I noticed that there wasn't a way to comment on documentation articles. These items allow only two responses: "This article was helpful" or "Flag this article as inaccurate." What I was reading was helpful and accurate, but most of the time I had more questions or knew I could add information that would be helpful to other users.

After several tweets, UserVoice eventually told me that clicking "flag this article as inaccurate" would allow me to provide feedback to the company (I tried this out and it did what I'd originally expected: marked it "flagged" but didn't provide a way to give more details. Oops.).

They also said that these options made dealing with comments easier to sort through on the support side (fair enough). But flagging has the connotation that you're sounding the alarm, so why would I anticipate using this to give comments (even if it did work)? Forcing a user to say something is inaccurate in order to add depth to the information seems completely counterintuitive.

Instead, providing a way to capture and embrace the knowledge, experience and time of your enthusiastic users is the best way to develop a vibrant and useful community (and customer base!).

Know exactly what to sell your customers, without even asking.

One day in Sprintly, I was adding new stories and trying out features, finding answers to my questions and happily voting for and creating ideas in the community… when I was cut off.

With UserVoice, participants have 10 points they can use to vote on existing ideas or add new ones. After you use them up, all you can do is view information and add written comments to existing items. Essentially it restricts users' voices to a certain volume, which makes me wonder if a volume knob would've been a better glyph than their megaphone.

But I get it. I can be overly talkative. I have a lot of thoughts, and they're not all diamonds. There's a need for balance in understanding what your user base wants as a whole. But really, you're completely cutting me off from adding ideas to the pool? Ideas that the builders behind this app might really want to tap into? You know, when I'm telling you exactly what to sell me?

I'm all for prioritizing the highest-value features before spending resources to create something that might just be a crazy idea that totally fails, so limiting how many votes a user can cast is fine by me.

But limiting user feedback, particularly if it has to do with new ideas, only serves to mute the conversation.

User feedback is a rich (and free) brainstorm that can make the difference between a decent product struggling to figure out how to improve and a fantastic product that gives users exactly what they want and need.

When all is (hopefully) said and done, companies are more than capable of prioritizing this feedback themselves, letting the weak ideas fall by the wayside and building upon the strong ones. Asking users in your feedback community to cull the pool is cutting potential off at the knees.

The outspoken will always find an outlet.

Before social media, customer service was primarily about managing angry customers, if not in person then by phone or possibly email. And to be fair, complaining on Twitter may be the fastest way to get resolution from a company.

But this doesn't have to be the whole conversation anymore, and we shouldn't limit ourselves to managing problems.

Stubborn vocalists like me will turn to mediums outside of the immediate customer community to connect to the people behind the product. I've been tweeting at Sprintly's founder since I was cut off by UserVoice, and to his credit, he's been super responsive. But he shouldn't have to manage feedback in so many places—it's not efficient and it's not collaborative.

I recently discovered that I could even work the system and create another user profile from which to start all over with points, but I don't want to hack it. I want it to be better. UserVoice may be more than a helpdesk, but it's less than a community.

The bottom line is that, as with anything, everyone will have opinions. The question is what you do with them. Your perspective on how to handle user feedback (and which user feedback community to choose) could be the difference between your product being loved by many or tolerated by few.