To All Readers: How do you manage your time on Get Satisfaction?

I hope it is not too much trouble for you to keep up with all of the users and activity on your own Get Satisfaction site, but I appreciate that you try. I know from my own experience that it can be a big job keeping up with a community.

I look forward to reading everyone's comments on this so that it can help me decide what to emphasize to our Get Satisfaction crew about new features that can help everyone be more efficient. When it comes to this kind of topic, I am admittedly a biased party. I spend most of the day responding to the community -- but that's my job.

One thing does initially occur to me: I think that this works on Get Satisfaction in many ways like it does in almost any customer-service/community management situation. When the voices of the customers/community become overwhelming, and you find that too much of your time is taken up interacting with your users, it might be time to hire someone to do that customer service or community management work.

If you don't have the resources for hiring people dedicated to customer service (and that unfortunately seems to be quite common) one way to help keep the level of interaction high is to encourage your customers to join in. Some organizations on our site enlist the help of power users and evangelists. For exmaple, I Want Sandy and HubDub do a fantastic job of enlisting what we like to call "Champions." They do an astounding amount of reaching out and responding to other customers. We'd like to institute a reward system for these types of folks (although companies are always welcome to institute their own reward system!).

So, I would say that getting your best customers involved is one way to tackle this issue. I'm sure others have a lot of great ideas, and I look forward to hearing them.