Geeks On A Plane leverages the combined cross border networks of Dave McClure, Founders Fund and Web2Asia to offer attendees an opportunity to accelerate the process of meeting and connecting with key contacts in Tokyo, Beijing and Shanghai’s tech and investment sector.

On this trip, UserVoice we’re meeting a slew of entrepreneurs and various start-ups to find out how we can better help companies with their Japanese and Chinese customers.  To demonstrate our sincere interest in moving into the Asian market, we launched a Japanese translation of UserVoice today!  We’ll be active to seek out opportunities to partner with local companies for a localized user experience on UV.

If you’d like to follow the action, please feel free to watch our activity on Twitter or the FaceBook fan page.

Since launching UserVoice last year (April 17th), we’ve intentionally aimed our service at appealing to business owners.  We feel that by empowering companies first, users will then have an active and listening ear from a company that is willing and ready to make changes based on their feedback.

Yesterday, Yelp further validated our belief that company involvement is vital, when they opened up their customer review site to business owners, giving them more control with responding to consumer reviews. NYT Link – AP Link

From the NY Times article:

“As the site matures, though, it has been doing more and more to appease small-business owners.”

Our experience has been that companies need and are actively looking for safe places to assist their brand.  If a site can empower & protect the company’s reputation, then it’s going to increase customer support and encourage sales.

With Yelp’s move toward small business and recent changes at GetSatisfaction, this begins to look like a trend, as tactics shift towards involving businesses.  In reality, they should have been doing this all along.  Companies need to feel secure when someone else is representing their brand.  If you’re building a website and having to cater to customers of these brands, remember to keep their interests first. The rest will follow.

That in mind, there are a number of Web 2.0 products that join Get Satisfaction in facilitating people-powered services, such as SuggestionBox and Yelp.  Any person can go to these pages and initiate discussion regardless of whether or not the company is involved. While empowering the user is an amazing proposition, it does not create a safe brand experience (as the 37Signals debacle clearly illustrates).

Different Than Get Satisfaction

We provide a Company-focused strategy, always have.  When you visit a branded UserVoice forum, you can be assured that your feedback is going directly to a company or organization.

In our opinion, helping companies engage and build relationships with their customers is a much stronger value proposition for both parties involved.  If you the user are going to take time out of your day to post feedback, there should be confidence that the company is indeed listening and able to respond.

For a company, they should feel that a third party destination is a safe-place for their customer interactions.  So we offer seamless integration, single sign on (SSO), and fully branded pages that reside on your domain.

Custom Branding Examples

UserVoice does not serve to eliminate offsite dialogue entirely, but steps out of the way to give your company a place to point these discussions toward.

Which is entirely the point — building long-lasting relationships between companies and their customers.

Perhaps in this way we are similar to Get Satisfaction in destination, however, we believe a Company-driven initiative provides a better overall Customer Service experience.

Better because the company is actually listening.

In the next few days we’ll be unpacking more of the Customer vs. Company-focused debate.  Please stay tuned.

He said to call ChoiceShirts, where you could customize your own design and all that good stuff. So I fired off an email and that’s when things got interesting. First off, I got an immediate follow on Twitter. Then a confirmation email asking when, where and all that. So far so good.

Then they made a video?

Yes, they made a video.

Not only did we get amazing quality shirts, customer service & super fast delivery – we also got a music video of our shirts in production. On top of that, he printed one up for himself! How cool is that?

If you’d like to have one of these fancy-dancy shirts for yourself, please march on over to ChoiceShirts.com and ORDER ONE!

Thanks guys – You Rock!