Socialmedian Demonstrates Exemplary Product Development

I know that for many of my online friends socialmedian has already become THE place to share and discover news and various thought-provoking articles. I can’t say that I myself am particularly active on the service yet I like what I see every time I visit. But what I enjoy the most about socialmedian is how they handle product management and development and rolling out updates to the service basically every week (judging by my inbox where I get emails from socialmedian founder Jason Goldberg whenever they have some new features announced).

Last week I got yet another email from socialmedian (same as all the other socialmedian users) inviting me to take part in a survey to express my opinion on socialmedian and its functionality. The first 500 of those taking the survey were supposed to receive socialmedian T-shirts so I could not resist since I am yet to see a company that is brave enough to send any swag my way to Russia - for some reason the address scares everyone away. So I had some vested interest, I have to admit.

The survey was nothing special - simply yet another survey of a startup trying to have their users more involved in the future of the product looking for their feedback on the existing functionality of the product and the potential new features the community was interested in seeing in the future. I answered all the questions myself and just imagine my surprise when I saw another email a few minutes ago announcing some new features based on users’ feedback in the survey.

The functionality launched today is called “Mood” and is intended for every user to be able to express how they feel on every item submitted and discussed on socialmedian. Under every submitted item you will now see two smiling faces - one of them actually smiling, the second one sad. If you click the smiling face, you will like the story while clicking the sad face will be an equivalent of disliking it. Clicking the word “Mood” near the smileys will open up a special pane showing which users liked and disliked this particular item.

The best part is that expressing mood about a news piece was actually the feature the majority of users named during the survey as one of the most desirable ones only last week - and mere days after the survey itself we see this feature implemented already. Of course it is no rocket science and adding the functionality may not be particularly difficult to implement but still it is good to see a startup listening to its users and actually doing something based on the feedback. And this latest addition is definitely an example of reacting pretty fast - and doing something instead of promising to do something is a rare talent these days so it should be admired.

If you use socialmedian yourself, I invite you to follow me here as well.