Yesterday I moderated a panel entitled “Building Awesome Services with the Help of Happy Users” at the web2.0 expo. This is a topic that has fascinated me since Dogster’s inception and I’ve been wanting to explore how this has worked for other companies. So I invited Stewart Butterfield (Flickr co-founder), Joshua Schachter (Del.icio.us founder) and Biz Stone (Obvious Corp founder (maker of Twitter) and previous a Blogger employee). You can relive it thanks to the excellent transcript posted by Sean Bohan.

One facet that became very clear is that companies that are committing to involving their users (aka your customers … and don’t you forget it) uphold that relationship no matter how big they get. I expect a hallmark of good companies in the coming decades will be how directly tuned in company leadership is to their customers’ wants, wishes and feelings.

Stewart thought that after Craigslist, Flickr could be the biggest company in the world that manages open forums that anyone can discuss the product. More importantly Stewart still hangs out and communicates in them regularly. Joshua said they he still follows the user maillists and gets paged for important issues. Biz posts his phone number on the website, takes calls any time of day and says hello to anyone using their API. They all said they still talk with users they met in the earliest days and have never stoppped doing so. They hire from within their customer base and aspire to never let down their users no matter how big they get or who acquires them.

Here at Dogster & Catster HQ, I spend a lot of time in the forums, share my email with great frequency and communicate with members by phone, email and IM whenever they contact me. My partner John does much the same, and our Community Manager Randi and Customer Service Manager John D. spend all day working, listening and helping the community. Early on I found that we only run the site in name, we’re actually the guardian of it on behalf of our customers. The better Caretaker we can be for our community, the better our business will be.

Afterwards I was talking with Jason Goldman, also an ex-Blogger working on Twitter and we realized it does not necessarily have to be the CEO, but it should be a founder or well respected person with authority that is close to most all decision making. In fact he thought that in the near future the Community Evangelist role could be as common as the Project Manager position is today. (Think back 10 years, did you know many respected Project Managers)

A great example of the founder / customer evangelist has to be Craig Newmark of Craigslist. Instead of getting further and further from the userbase as Craigslist exploded, he moved himself closer and closer to it. As IT and management roles could be filled by new people he moved all his time to Customer Service. I doubt Craigslist could be so big worldwide, if the person who cared about it the most didn’t stay as close to their customers as possible.

[Photos by Scott Beale, LaughingSquid]