PUBLIC MARKS from dimelo with tag en

“Social media is a grand experiment,” Dell’s Jarvis said. “It has a future. I don’t see it crashing down. Social interaction, communities and participation are absolutely the fabric of the Web. Our challenge is how do we leverage those best for our customers.”

When asked about specific types of interactions, Americans believe: Companies should use social networks to solve my problems (43%) Companies should solicit feedback on their products and services (41%) Companies should develop new ways for consumers to interact with their brand (37%) Companies should market to consumers (25%)

The next phase of Dell's listening campaign has been to go beyond damage control and into building better products. During a recent chat, the CEO was eager to show me a laptop his company developed with customer input. Engineers get a lot of their feedback the old-fashioned way, hand-delivering early models to major buyers. But they also pick over a Dell site called IdeaStorm early in the development of a project for a sense of what the masses care about. The site lets anyone sign in and offer suggestions - and vote other people's ideas up or down. If you've ever used the wisdom-of-crowds social network Digg, you get the idea. "Now you go to IdeaStorm and type in any keyword you can think of that has anything to do with what you're working on, and see what people are saying," says Dell.

A few weeks ago, I discussed the 2008 Tribalization of Business Study, sponsored by Beeline Labs, Deloitte, and the Society for New Communications Research, to discuss the gap between the importance many enterprises attribute to the development of communities and the accompanying investment in that engagement strategy, whether focused on internal stakeholders, or externally on customers. I noted that the findings of the Tribalization study point to a Community Gap.

Aima, the analyst behind the report "Grown Up? White Label Social Networking Targeting the Enterprise," says that although the "white-label market" -- in which vendors create unbranded applications for use by a wide range of corporate users -- is in its early stages when it comes to social networking, the potential demand is high: ABI forecasts that the market will be worth nearly $1.3 billion in 2013.

Following Dell’s Ideastorm, Starbucks has no opened a forum — also powered by Salesforce.com — where customers can make suggestions then discuss and vote on them. Starbucks, of all companies, with its loyal and opinionated customers, should have been doing this years ago. Every company should be doing it now.

I firmly believe that the community manager should be one of the first hires - right after a solid engineering group and before you invest in corporate marketing people

The Linux-on-Dell idea emerged in February 2007, after CEO Michael Dell debuted a new company-hosted blog called IdeaStorm, where customer could offer ideas and input on prospective new products and services. More than 100,000 people posted comments about wanting to see the company sell computers straight from the factory with Linux preloaded.

You know better than anyone else what you want from Starbucks. So tell us. What’s your Starbucks Idea? Revolutionary or simple—we want to hear it. Share your ideas, tell us what you think of other people’s ideas and join the discussion. We’re here, and we’re ready to make ideas happen. Let’s get started.

Now, so is Starbucks. Through MyStarbucksIdea, the company proposes to take suggestions from customers on what changes they would like to see Starbucks (Nasdaq: SBUX) make, Collier says in his post. The community then votes on their favorites and provides comments. Collier thinks the site is a great idea -- and fervently hopes Starbucks doesn't flub it. He's not casting aspersions on the firm. He just believes, in general, that few companies are prepared to handle an onslaught of advice from their customers.

Unlike other companies that have hoped to present social media tools for gaining free consults from their customers while also presenting new information to consumers, Starbucks is very straightforward with its desire to take your ideas into consideration.

Today, marketing is exploding with possibilities but also complexities as it reaches out into new forms of communication channels and increasingly engaging media. Marketers have an exceptional opportunity to use these new tools to reach their audience, even in a fragmented world. It is becoming essential for marketers to understand the context of the "new marketing", and prioritise what they need to do to develop customer engagement, build communities and maximise profit in a time of marketing confusion. Online and interactive marketing initiatives should indeed be considered as an effective divergence from traditional marketing mediums as marketers have the opportunity to engage customers in a "conversation" that is not just steered toward standardised product messaging.

For Dell it has a happy ending. Dell started listening to its customers, giving conversations with them and turned things around.  It has totally changed the way they think about their customer relationships.

If we live in a knowledge economy, we have to accept that employees are the ones who know how local things need and can be improved. Top down approaches have to give some space to Bottom up ones. We have to let them voice, converse and listen to them, as a minimum. Blogs, wikis or tools such as Feedback 2.0, correctly backed by a precise policy, are made for that. It is their real value in a corporate world.

Opening a two-way (community-brand) flow of communication is the starting point to benefit from all the value brought by the network. Brands should engage more in opening up authentic conversations, in order to create reputation and trust, instead of either remaining passive witnesses of this phenomenon or goofily entering the world of social networks.

Companies everywhere are monitoring blogs and other online discussions for feedback on their brands, providing them with information about coming products and placing "viral" advertisements on video-sharing sites.