I was pretty surprised by a commercial on the Olympics by shoe-makers Crocs. The site invited users to upload videos about the shoes saying why they loved — or hated — the shoes.
The site has a bunch of videos now, of varying levels of production quality, ranting or raving about Crocs. It’s an unusual idea for a company, to give hate the same billing as love. But it makes sense.
There are a lot of places for people to spew hate on the Internet, so why not try and corral it when you can?
And for newspapers, it’s even more useful. We are — and we should be — polarizing. People will be angry about our editorials and have opinions about our stories. Why not give them a place to talk? It would be useful to find out what people are thinking and what we might need to change.
There will inevitably be the usual trolling: OMG yr paper is teh sux0rz! Die plz. Kthxbai
The Crocs site doesn’t have to deal with that as much, because they set a relatively high bar to entry. But we can igore the useless comments and work on fixing the problems we find. It helps to follow Chip Scanlan’s advice to Be a sponge, be a duck.
So are any papers out there giving people a place to talk specifically about the issues they have with the paper?