How to listen to customers, and not just the loud people

One of the things I realized when working for a social startup is that many of those web 2.0, happy user generated content things make it super easy to listen to feedback. (As in, trolling your OWN site and using it to keep people in the loop is surprisingly easy.)

Pay attention to your heavy users, or the people with lots of friends, or various other metrics of activity. Many times, they can become your friends with minimal effort, and soon they'll IM you whenever they hit a bug, and tell all their friends. The more you know about their lives, and the "problems" that your site is solving, the more focused and direct the work can be.

Yay internet.