Play time: A year ago you had a brilliant idea for a new product, let’s just call it a widget. After much market analysis and product development your widget was released to the public. Perhaps it was released to great fanfare – perhaps disappointment. Either outcome lends itself to analysis about what is good and what is bad with the product. After all, every great product must have something missing, for at least someone, and every great disappointment hopefully had something right.

To determine the hits and the misses of a given product, including services, many companies will employ user groups, product testers, and feedback forms. These are all fine, but the Web offers managers a wealth of free feedback from customers across the globe – feedback that can help a company evolve a product to match user demands and expectations. Some companies, such as Dell, offer forums that allow users and employees to help each other through problems. Scouring these forums will yield both the good and the bad of specific products, but this takes a lot of digging and cross-communication. Now, how about using online stores, product review sites and even Twitter to collect product feedback? I will touch on how each of these three methods can help product managers collect feedback at no cost to the company other than time.

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Online stores. I regularly purchase items online and when I do I often look for customer reviews about the product I am about to buy. Sites like Amazon provide plenty of specifications about a product, but I find that I often skip right to the customer reviews to see what other consumers like and dislike about the product. Chances are that many other consumers do the same thing and, as such, should companies not be taking these reviews seriously when it comes to collecting feedback and evolving their product? Hopefully they already are, but if not, these user-submitted reviews offer amazing detail on likes, dislikes and missing features.

Product review sites. These are the sites along the lines of Epinions and CNET Reviews that offer both professional and user-submitted reviews. Reviewers often offer detailed reviews of specific products and highlight product specifications that either make or break a given product. Often it is necessary to filter out some reviews that either are not relevant, contain spam, or are poorly written in order to find reviews that offer substantial value to the company. Just like online stores, this voluntary feedback can provide companies with the requirements to succeed with future iterations of any given product or service.

Twitter. I just had to mention Twitter again! Over the past few weeks I have been following both a product development and product marketing phenomenon regarding an upcoming videogame. Infinity Ward, creators of many Call of Duty videogames, has been using Twitter to request features for their much anticipated release of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 this fall. Infinity Ward employee Robert Bowling (@fourzerotwo) has been asking fans of the series to request features for the upcoming release. By using the hashtag #mw2, Twitter users can submit feature requests directly to the Infinity Ward development team. Anyone can then vote up/down specific requests at Infinity Ward’s #MW2 page. Not only is this method generating many ideas for developer consideration every minute, it is also helping Infinity Ward hype Modern Warfare 2 by involving the community. There is no doubt in my mind that we will be seeing other companies duplicate this method of feedback – #RTideas anyone?