Should you involve your customers in determining your strategy. My view - yes you should and we have found a good technique to help you to do it.

Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a technique for getting customers to help you improve your business.The theory of Net Promoter Score is really easy. Unlike most things where the theory is easy, the practice is also easy.

There's a website for an American company here. NPS seems to be a system with some research behind it but I don't know if there's any IP protection on the technique - can't see how there could be but I don't know.

You ask your customers three questions:

1. How likely on a scale of 0 to 10 are you to recommend [insert your company here] to a friend or colleague (where 10 is very likely and 0 is not at all likely).
2. What's the main reason for giving that score? (keep repeating until they don't have anything else to tell you)
3. What would we need to do to enable you to give a score of 10? (keep repeating until they don't have anything else to tell you)

The way that you calculate your score is shown here.

The following image is reproduced from the above referenced page with acknowledgements.

In our experience you get very high response rates (40% and up) and the customers tell you what's on their mind in a very open and honest way.

This "voice of the customer" input is vital to determining the strategy that you should adopt in my opinion.

One of the main advantages of NPS is that it gives you a score that can be tracked over time as you work to do the things that your customers tell you.

Silkmoth have used this technique both for ourselves to improve our business (and it has done) and for our customers. We have developed some tools to help our customers carry out these sorts of surveys.

I recommend it to the house.

Google have announced their own social network Buzz. At the moment it looks like you'll need a GMail account to use it but we expect this limitation will be lifted if the new service stands any chance of success.

We'll keep an eye on it to see how it fares against the big boys. For now here's Google's preview...

Is there room for another social network in our lives or has Google arrived too late? Remember they were late to the Search Engine party too!