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April 27, 2005
Meetup.com disses its customers
It's a tough job for any service to go from free to fee. It requires a delicate balance of fortitude, transparency and compassion, and Meetup.com is not alone.
The company announced recently it plans to charge for its previously free service of helping groups organize meetings via the web. A few customers, naturally, were rather tweaked about the idea.
Such as the Seattle Blogger Meetup Group... It discussed the plans at a recent meeting and the posted some comical pictures from the meeting with snarky captions about the company. Meetup's VP of Communications, Myles Weissleder, was not amused and posted a satiric message on the Meetup.com corporate blog calling the offending group "Belly'Achin Bloggers in Seattle."
This making-fun-of-customers story is, of course, making its way across the blogosphere.
One of the Seattle bloggers provides good advice on working with bloggers:
- Never, ever insult your customers, even in jest.
- Think before you blog, especially if you're a corporate blogger.
- Bloggers are the worst people in the world to insult, because they will tell the whole world about it.
[Thanks to Treb Gatte for the heads up on the story.]
Other blogs that reference Meetup.com disses its customers:
» Meetup Blowin It from pc4media
I actually don't think this is called for: Meetup provides a nice service. They deserve to make their payroll. [Read More]
» Meetup insults their early customer champions... from Emergence Marketing
This is hilarious. The VP of Communications at Meetup.com, which recently decided to start charging for their service insulted a group of early users on their web site - calling them "Belly Achin bloggers in Seattle." You can follow the... [Read More]
There are at least two lessons for marketers here. First, don't surprise your users with a fee for a free service. Let them know up front that you intend to charge a fee later on. Second, don't charge a fee for a Web service when there equally good Web services that are free.
The meetup.com guy has apologized.
I like the fact that they left the original post, rather than sweeping the whole thing under the carpet like other people have done in the past (see my post on it at http://luca9200.typepad.com/blog/2005/03/harvard_univers.html ).
There is a silver lining to the dark cloud of this Meetup controversy. Her name is Hilary, and she is their forum administrator.
I don't know any other way to say this: I am her most ardent fan.
To Meetup's credit, the day that the infamous fees plan was announced, they created a separate forum just for comments related to it. As I post this, one thread alone in that forum is up to 87 pages!
At the epicenter of this quake stands Hilary. Yet despite abuse and epithets, flame wars and threats, she has maintained the message boards with aplomb and grace. Aside from a few asterisked naughty words, and very few deleted posts, the entire response of their customer base is intact. There's some evidence they've actually read this outpouring of angst and anger, too: two minor tweaks in the plan have already been implemented.
Yes, I think the fee structure will eventually hurt Meetup. Yes, I think the way the news was delivered was atrocious. And yes, the whole issue with the Seattle webloggers was, to coin a phrase, a case of "open mouth, shoot foot."
But I think Meetup should get credit for providing a mechanism for capturing, in real time, the evolving opinions of its customer base.
Now if only they'd done that BEFORE the fees plan was cast in stone...
