Chapter 3 of Joshua Porter’s super-helpful “Desiging for the Social Web” focuses on a common theme among the web’s cognoscenti: customer service is the new marketing.  Since this new age of social media is all about community and conversation, the way a company speaks with its customers is inherently part of their product.

Joshua also points out that many successful web apps are developed by the same people who use them.  Reading this had a very reassuring effect on me.  The Qwidget was built for web publishers who want to create more dialogue around their content.  That’s us.  We began as a company as content producers and we continue to produce television and web video with the aim of fostering conversations.

With our stated mission being “create dialogue,” it wouldn’t be very helpful for me to aim for a huge distribution without helping people maximize the use of the qwidget.  Web apps like Top Friends on Facebook don’t necessariliy need action to be successful.  You install it, pick your top friends and you never need to touch it again.  But the dialogue we aim to create requires constant attention.  So I will always try to heed Joshua’s advice and give my all to helping our users.  We also don’t have a marketing budget so providing good customer service is kind of my only shot.