The legalities of quoting our customers
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Head of E-commerce at DUO
15 April 2009 15:31pm
Hi there,
We get an awful lot of very positive, unprompted feedback from our customers into our customer services inbox. Lucky us ;)
We want to do two things with these comments;
1) Post them to our website
2) Attribute them to the customer's name
Does anyone have any advice on the legality of this? Any permission required to do this? How about if we were just to post a first name?
Many thanks for any advice,
Gareth
E-Business Consultant at Dan Barker
15 April 2009 18:05pm
hi, Gareth, I'm not surprised - you have a great product.
Why not:
1. Add a note to your contact form saying "Duo Boots may publish your comment on our site in the form of a testimonial. If you do not want to be quoted, please check this box..."
2. Drop the customers whose comments you want to use a note, asking for permission. They'd probably love it.
dan
ps. who does the creative on your site? love the background & the flash stuff on the homepage image.
Head of E-commerce at DUO
16 April 2009 17:34pm
Hi Dan,
Thanks for this. I think that checkbox is a good idea on the Contact Form. I think however that the vast majority of our feedback is unsolicited, just people reply to despatch confirmation emails, saying they love the product or the service.
I guess the only way to approach this is to ask for permission to use their quote and name by specifically replying to each one of them.
Thanks for the compliment on our web design, we're actually lucky enough to have an internal graphic designer who has done this for us.
Gareth
Copywriter at HappyCopy
20 April 2009 19:12pm
Hi Gareth,
I don't know much about the legalities of it but if I were you I would ask each individual person for permission to use their comments and name.
You don't want to run even the slightest risk of offending such satisfied customers by using them without permission.
If they are happy enough to feedback, they are almost certainly happy enough to respond positively to your request.
Should you recieve any particularly enthusiastic success stories, you could even ask your customer if you could use them as the basis of a press release - good PR potential for you both.
/mytwocents
Felicity
Journalist and SEO copywriter
21 April 2009 13:18pm
test
Managing Director at Content Formula
28 April 2009 16:40pm
Not as friendly as the other suggestions above, but you could add a clause in your legal statement (T&Cs) on your website which say that you may use comments offered up by users for marketing purposes. You should repeat this clause in the privacy policy. I would avoid using surnames to be safe. PS - I am not a lawyer but we have a few clients for whom compliance is really important - so we've got some experience in this area.
Director at 0141 Design
09 May 2009 22:34pm
why don't you go one step further and ask them to record a video testimonial via www.vMessage.net. once they send it to your you can save it and record post it on your website.