CrowdSound, the social feedback widget

Written on August 15, 2008 – 6:17 pm
Robin Wauters, Next web enthusiast & Plugg organizer

I just stumbled across CrowdSound, a slick widget that enables anyone to gather ’social feedback’ from users and customers. There’s inherent value to creating and maintaining a direct dialogue between you and your customers, so I decided to take a look and see if it’s really a good tool to implement in order to improve customer relationships and product development.

CrowdSound is a social widget that allows anyone to become part of a discussion on your site, without the need to leave it, thus allowing a direct conversation between other users and yourself. In fact, the widget allows you to interact without even signing up for an account, so the threshold is pretty low. You can run CrowdSound widgets on your own website or on a CS-hosted one (example).

This is a test widget I set up in a few seconds:

Furthermore, the widget can be customized to fit your site’s look and feel, all to provide a seamless, integrated experience for sharing suggestions and voting on other users’ submissions. CrowdSound allows for suggestions to be marked as ‘private’, allowing a customer to submit a suggestion that can only be seen by your company, and also allowing you to take offline sensitive suggestions that may otherwise be visible to your competitors.

You can also pre-define categories, such as bugs, feature requests, account-specific issues, etc. The company even offers a full-featured iPhone interface for managing CrowdSound conversations on the go.

Some of the features mentioned above are not available in the free version (a pro version sets you back $10 a month), but the basic functionality offered in the free version seems to be sufficient for a test-drive. A non-embeddable (grrr) screencast can be watched here.

CrowdSound is the work of Washington-based Intridea, who makes other cool stuff like SocialSpring, MediaPlug and Scalr.

On a sidenote: the backend of the platform seems to extremely ‘inspired’ by the lay-out of WordPress, as you can tell from the screenshot below.

I hope you like that post!

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CrowdSound, Intridea, social feedback, widget

About the author: Robin Wauters is a Belgium-based social media consultant, startup advisor, blogger, entrepreneur, Twitter fanatic, conference organizer and allround web addict. Between trying out just about every new web application that gets in his sight, he advises local startups like ContactOffice, Oxynade and Yuntaa. And when he's not busy trying to keep tabs with what's going on in the virtualization & cloud computing industry as managing editor of Virtualization.com, he's probably working on the organization of Plugg, an annual celebration of European web entrepreneurship.

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5 comments/trackbacks to “CrowdSound, the social feedback widget”

Aug 22, 2008: Marc’s Voice » Blog Archive » Vacation over - blogging - end of Aug. ‘08
[...] SportsFanLive, Verizon PIP, Open Sim, CrowdSound, Storrz, 12seconds, digital nomads, RoyaltyShare, Nesting, LivePlace, Open Salon, UserVoice, [...]

By Luca F. on Aug 15, 2008

the tool looks good, but 10$ per month is way too expensive…

they should at least offer a 2 months trial for the full version in order to evaluate the potential.

[Reply]
By 禾草唐楷 on Aug 16, 2008

That is a subscription service, ah, very unfortunately, I really needed for such services

[Reply]
By Patrick de Laive on Aug 17, 2008

I like it. Also nice to see the suggestions of the readers for this blog. Someting we can work on, thanks.

[Reply]
By robert on Sep 10, 2008

See the same tool from lattice purple technologies… the product is called YouSuggest here http://yousuggest.us and I think their widget is priced for free…:) They also provide innovation communities to large scale corporataions.

[Reply]

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