“Your Product is a Piece of Sh#t”: How My Company Responded To This Tweet

Back in 2010, popular pizza chain Domino’s took a whole new approach to business following a major PR disaster set off by a highly inappropriate video shot by two employees on the job (which involved cheese being put up noses and onto pizzas). As part of its drastic shift in strategy, Domino’s reached out to customers with a survey asking for immediate and honest feedback on its product. Then, in a twist, it decided to make public some of the results, which were largely negative. Customers told the company that its pizza crust tasted like cardboard, its tomato sauce had the consistency of ketchup and that they felt frozen pizza was superior to Domino’s. Yikes.

Then, something amazing happened. Domino’s actually did something about it. It launched a campaign called Pizza Turnaround to reinvent its pizza “from the crust up.” The strategy worked. Within months of releasing its new and improved pie, Domino’s reported one of the largest quarterly same-store sales jumps ever recorded by a major fast-food chain. And since then, Domino’s has continued to foster open dialogue with its customers using a variety of emerging digital channels, like social media. (The brand currently has an impressive 10 million fans on Facebook.) The whole approach must be working—Domino’s, which was founded back in 1960, has seen its stock surge from $7.73 in 2009 to more than $70 in 2014.

The point here is that negative customer feedback is always painful but, when used right, it can be an invaluable asset in business. Bill Gates may have put it best years ago when he said, “Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.” The good news is that right now learning from customers is easier than it’s ever been. With the proliferation of social media, any business can engage in open dialogue with customers via networks like Facebook and Twitter, at a fraction of the cost of, say, putting together a massive customer focus group.

Recently, my own company unveiled a major makeover of a key piece of our core product—the Hootsuite dashboard. Users see the dashboard—which organizes multiple social media accounts into one screen—each and every time they log into Hootsuite.com. And, well, over the years, the UI had aged a bit. Since we launched in 2008, social media has grown much more sophisticated; we wanted a new dashboard to reflect this evolution. We also wanted to acknowledge and respond openly to the input we receive from our users.

So to kickstart the project, we first sorted through user feedback from one of our main company social media channels, our Hootsuite Twitter account, looking for some of the worst, most critical messages about the look of our dashboard. Then, instead of tucking them away in a file folder somewhere, we decided to bring them into the light. Our engineers and designers went to work addressing these issues, while our creative team put together a YouTube video to own up to our flaws. Inspired by comedian Jimmy Kimmel’s hilarious "Celebrities Read Mean Tweets" segment, it should be good for a quick laugh.

After months of work, we launched our new dashboard several weeks ago, using the “Mean Tweets” video to promote the changes. We’ve received some great responses from our users, and also heard back from people who say they appreciate our modern and transparent approach. It’s a great lesson: openness, humility and transparency is really the only way to move forward. It’s something we’ll be keeping very much in mind as we roll out more improvements in the months ahead.

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6 Amazing Advances in Cloud Technology

The cloud is more than just dirt-cheap data storage and lightning-fast apps. These six innovations show that it's possible to manage servers, develop applications, run virtual machines and even sequence the human genome using cloud technology.

Nothing ever changes in the cloud, right? That might seem to be the case if, say, a company starts using Box for sales presentations or relying on one of the many online accounting device that works from anywhere and manages the security for you. Many of these systems are maturing and don't make radical improvements — and that's often a good thing.However, innovations do pop up. Many, including the six discussed below, could impact your business this year.

Genetic Sequencing

Using powerful supercomputers to help with cancer research isn't exactly new — but moving the scientific calculations to the cloud marks a major undertaking. Analyst Charles King says this is a significant project in two major ways: One, it's try to understand the genomic sequencing that occurs in brain cancer patients, and two, it's showing how the cloud is maturing. The cloud-based version of IBM Watson can scan databases and learn how to customize treatments to patient DNA.

This advancement might not seem that world-changing, although it's surprising that Microsoft has finally launched Office apps on the Apple iPad. What is game-changing for business users: The apps sync securely to the cloud. The apps are also free for business users who've already standardized on Office 365 and pay the monthly Web usage storage fees. Importantly, the apps were designed for tablet use, meaning they support swiping and other gestures.

Basic6

Using a console to manage cloud servers and data center services in one view lets you accomplish tasks such as managing accounts, setting passwords and controlling Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) features.

The main innovation with Basic6, though, is that the dashboard works in real-time for services such as Box and AWS at the same time. Most features are managed using a tree structure on the left pane. The console maintains an audit trail of exactly which changes were made to which cloud services.

Box View

Writing code for the cloud might be about as dull as a routine health exam, but Box is making it as easy as possible. One innovation, Box View, essentially gives even nonprogrammers a way to upload a business document and create rich HTML sites with an embedded document viewer. It's also a sign of things to come — that is, the cloud will continue to evolve in terms of developing custom apps and features that match business needs.

Amazon WorkSpaces

Offering a virtual desktop to employees has always presented one great IT challenge: Making sure the desktop is always available and tuned for speedy performance. Amazon recently started offering WorkSpaces, a cloud-based desktop that runs on laptops and tablets.

The main innovation of Amazon WorkSpaces concerns network optimization using Amazon Web Services; this provides the same kind of availability you've come to expect from a cloud storage service or custom application.

SmartVue

Video surveillance in a corporate setting is a different beast from home surveillance; there are likely policies about encrypting the signal, storing the recorded video and managing the cameras, among other things. The Smartvue cloud surveillance servers lets you view and manage cameras from a Web browser. Security cameras installed on premises can link to the cloud server for policy management, storage and security controls — and many third-party cameras will work just fine.

50 years of BASIC

BASIC creators John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz.

The mainframe isn't the only technology hitting the ripe old age of 50 this year. On May 1st, the BASIC programming language, first developed by Dartmouth College Professors Thomas Kurtz and John Kemeny, celebrates 50 years.

At the time, computers were highly serial. You loaded punch cards and waited your turn to run the application. That was known as batch processing. As computers matured from vacuum tubes to silicon semiconductors, they became more powerful and gained the ability to run multiple programs at once.

Kemeny wanted a language that would allow people to write their own programs and execute at the same time. Kemeny and a programming student both ran a program at the same time written in Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code, and both got their responses back. BASIC was born.

BASIC lived up to its name and was fairly straightforward, making it much easier to program than writing in assembler language or punch cards. It would start on minicomputers like the DEC PDP line. It would be released on the growing number of personal computers in the 1970s.

When the Altair 8800 came out, there were actually two BASIC compilers for it, both inspired by the minicomputer version of the language: Tiny BASIC, a simple version of the language, and Altair BASIC, written by a company called Micro-Soft. You may have heard of them.

Radio Shack's TRS-80, Apple Computer's Apple II, and Commodore's PET 2001 all came with BASIC built into the firmware, and IBM would release a BASIC interpreter for its Personal Computer as well. BASIC would eventually be overshadowed in significance with developers by C and later C++, but it remained a popular first language for many programmers to grasp the concepts of programming.

Microsoft would return to its roots, breathing new life into BASIC in 1991 with the release of Visual Basic, which helped developers write Windows-based BASIC apps that were actually compiled, not just interpreted. Thanks to the power of the VB compiler, it found favor as more than just a teaching tool, and commercial apps were soon being developed with VB. Granted, many if not most were freeware/shareware, but it was more than anyone expected out of BASIC.

BASIC is still alive and kicking. Wikipedia lists 33 different compilers, plus there is True BASIC, the direct successor to Dartmouth BASIC from a company co-owned by Kurtz. There are even a few in the iOS App Store. It doesn't look a thing like the AppleSoft BASIC I was learning 30 years ago, but that's why it survives; BASIC adapted and grew.

Dartmouth will be holding a series of events to mark the anniversary on the campus, but they will also be broadcast on the Internet.