Trust…your customers?

I get the Online Media Daily in my inbox every day, and yesterday they carried an article about the lawsuit that Electronic Arts is facing as a result of the DRM software bundled with their new, fantastically fun game called Spore.

For those of you who aren’t closely following the case (I think that’s probably most of you), the problem is that Spore came bundled with a set of anti-piracy software that, among other thing, limits you from installing the game on more than three computers, ever.

In other words, if you think you’re going to have more than three different computers from this point on in the rest of your life, and you want to keep playing Spore for the rest of your life (admittedly unlikely), you’re SOL.

But the real issue here is how completely EA mistrusts its customers.

And they’re not alone, either. I was listening to the PC Gamer podcast a little while ago and heard someone tell the story of copy protection software on Bioshock preventing the game from installing on his system because it didn’t like his DVD drive. You can’t return open PC Games anywhere anymore, and so he was out $50.

When you think about it, that’s a pretty crap way to treat your customers. Many companies don’t realize that there is a dollar that kind of treatment and they need to take it into account.

Suicide

I’m going to draw another weird parallel here: suicide fences.

I read a really interesting article in the New York Times Magazine a few months ago called The Urge to End It All that explored the facts of suicide in America.

One of the really big surprises to me was that suicide fences actually work. Really well. Because people tend to commit suicide way more often when it’s only slightly more convenient:

After three people leapt from the Ellington in a single 10-day period in 1985, a consortium of civic groups lobbied for a suicide barrier to be erected on the span. Opponents to the plan, which included the National Trust for Historic Preservation, countered with the same argument that is made whenever a suicide barrier on a bridge or landmark building is proposed: that such barriers don’t really work, that those intent on killing themselves will merely go elsewhere. In the Ellington’s case, opponents had the added ammunition of pointing to the equally lethal Taft standing just yards away: if a barrier were placed on the Ellington, it was not at all hard to see exactly where thwarted jumpers would head.

Except the opponents were wrong. A study conducted five years after the Ellington barrier went up showed that while suicides at the Ellington were eliminated completely, the rate at the Taft barely changed, inching up from 1.7 to 2 deaths per year. What’s more, over the same five-year span, the total number of jumping suicides in Washington had decreased by 50 percent, or the precise percentage the Ellington once accounted for.

In other words, including some copy protection is a good idea, because it is going to stop a lot of people from stealing your product.

But you don’t need tons of really heavy duty barriers to have a dramatic effect on user behavior.

OK, now what about social media?

The principle is the same in any industry: you need to trust your customers to gain their loyalty.

Trust them with your product. Trust them on your site. Trust them to provide good feedback. Trust them to be good members of an online community. Trust them not to lie on surveys.

Trusting your customers is how you develop relationships and build your base of 1,000 true fans.

When you’re designing your web experience or your e-mail system or your phone support system or, frankly, anything that has a customer contact point, keep in mind that zealous copy protection or ridiculous terms of service can be incredibly off-putting, and even drive people away.

Your customers are the people you need the most. Guide them with fences. Don’t confine them with walls.

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