Holding your hands up to a mistake will improve your relationships with subscribers of your web service. Founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg in his last 3 posts has held up his hands to mistakes made. Mark thanks those that have given him feedback on how the service could be improved and what hasnt worked. This is great feedback for a company to receive; I can imagine a lot of offline marketers would be overjoyed to receive such honest, constructive criticisms.
Some companies that own websites are beginning to understand that that they can’t control how their audience interacts with them. If you force an idea your public will rebel by talking with their feet and searching out the competitions website. Giving the control back to the user and allowing them to call the shots earns a wealth of respect. If a company does get it wrong, you can be sure that a loyal number of followers will soon be letting them know what they don’t like, and some giving souls will even tell them how to go about it.
The next step is to act on the feedback as quickly as possible. If it is going to be placed in the to do list as a long term goal then let your loyal followers know by displaying it on your website, blog about it or send a tweet. If you don’t react to the feedback given then you will have an unsettled community that could lose some members.
This of course is the control freaks ultimate nightmare, but if you do feel you fall into this bracket you really must let go for the good of your reputation. Not being perfect is only human and the benefits of allowing your audience the right to reply, no matter how bad it is that they discover, far outweighs keeping a supposedly tight ship corporate identity with a basic “About us” and “Company History” style pages without conversations being struck. I don’t need to spell out how improving a service off the back of user feedback will benefit a website and user perception and loyalty.