What is a successful organization? In three words, it is one which ‘embraces customer suggestions.’ Li and Bernoff refer to this as embracing the groundswell. Simply put, organizations should listen to customer conversations on online forums and integrate these suggestions into their products/services. The key for organizations is not just to listen, but also to create avenues for customers to talk, such as through private communities, and ratings and reviews sections on websites.
For organizations, harnessing customer innovation in product development processes is as easy as ABC:
A: Always encourage customers to talk on forums, and to rate and review your products and services.
B: Be sure to listen carefully to this conversation
C: Channel these ideas, compliments and complaints into enhancing your product/service and corporate brand.
Organizations and consumers should build a mutually beneficial, symbiotic relationship. After all, an organization needs feedback on improving its products and services and on developing new ones, and the consumer is eager to tell the organization exactly what they need or desire. Such collaboration is ideal.
Starbucks is an excellent example of an organization that has tapped into community ideas through social media and made customers an integral part of their innovation. Starbucks received over 17,000 coffee ideas in the first year of the launch of its online forum, "My StarBucks Idea." To date, the company has received 20,627 ideas just about coffee and expresso drinks. The site is overflowing with ideas - in fact, just 6 minutes ago, a customer posted this: “Please offer ‘truvia’, a natural calorie-free sweetner.”
To effectively tap onto customer suggestions, Starbucks has organized its site into ‘Product ideas,’ ‘Experience ideas’ and ‘Involvement ideas’ with the last category referring to corporate social responsibility and community involvement. Importantly, the coffee giant tells customers what has been done with their ideas by placing a tick next to “Under Review”, “Reviewed”, “Coming Soon,” and “Launched.”
Do check out their site and share your thoughts on what they did well and what they could do better to engage their customers. http://mystarbucksidea.force.com/
Showing posts with label groundswell. Show all posts
Showing posts with label groundswell. Show all posts
Sunday, February 21, 2010
Saturday, January 23, 2010
Earth, Mars, Jupiter…Social Media – The evolution of a new planet
Welcome to Planet Social Media!
The countries here go by the name of Twitter, YouTube, MySpace, Linked In and Facebook. I beg your pardon… “The United Users of Facebook” (UUF for short). Considering that Facebook has 350 million active users (as of January 2010), UUF would be the third largest country on Planet Earth, behind China and India. It doesn’t take much to become a UUF citizen – just a Facebook account and a desire to connect!
One of your rights as a UUF citizen or a Twitterian is the power to connect online to your fellow citizens, share information and experiences, recommend or rate companies or institutions. Li and Bernoff (2008) call this new social phenomenon – the groundswell - A social trend in which people use technologies to get the things they need from each other; rather than from traditional institutions like corporations.
In short, people on Planet Social Media are empowered to generate online content and share this with other netizens or cybercitizens. Such an explosion of content seems harmless one might think, but organizations bear the brunt of this. The groundswell is threatening organizations as customers are talking to each other about products and services and redefining brands which companies spent millions of dollars to create (Li and Bernoff, 2008).
This explosion of information compels organizations to be more socially responsible and enhance their product/service standards. Sadly though, sometimes, organizations are unfairly criticized by consumers and customers. Nevertheless, as public relations practitioners, we should adopt a two-way symmetrical model which advocates active listening and genuine dialogue with our stakeholders. What makes our endeavor tough is the disproportionate ratio of PR practitioners in an organization to consumers, and the constant need to keep abreast of technological advances to communicate with our audience. Let's move away from this initial reluctance to embrace technology, for the benefits are many. Ultimately, when our organization becomes a UUF citizen or Twitterian, we become more approachable to our fellow citizens, earn their trust, build relationships and improve our products/services from their feedback.
As PR practitioners, we are not alone in this journey to Planet Social Media. Many of us have made this trip before and succeeded! Join me every week as I come closer to discovering a whole new universe! Packed your bags yet?
The countries here go by the name of Twitter, YouTube, MySpace, Linked In and Facebook. I beg your pardon… “The United Users of Facebook” (UUF for short). Considering that Facebook has 350 million active users (as of January 2010), UUF would be the third largest country on Planet Earth, behind China and India. It doesn’t take much to become a UUF citizen – just a Facebook account and a desire to connect!
One of your rights as a UUF citizen or a Twitterian is the power to connect online to your fellow citizens, share information and experiences, recommend or rate companies or institutions. Li and Bernoff (2008) call this new social phenomenon – the groundswell - A social trend in which people use technologies to get the things they need from each other; rather than from traditional institutions like corporations.
In short, people on Planet Social Media are empowered to generate online content and share this with other netizens or cybercitizens. Such an explosion of content seems harmless one might think, but organizations bear the brunt of this. The groundswell is threatening organizations as customers are talking to each other about products and services and redefining brands which companies spent millions of dollars to create (Li and Bernoff, 2008).
This explosion of information compels organizations to be more socially responsible and enhance their product/service standards. Sadly though, sometimes, organizations are unfairly criticized by consumers and customers. Nevertheless, as public relations practitioners, we should adopt a two-way symmetrical model which advocates active listening and genuine dialogue with our stakeholders. What makes our endeavor tough is the disproportionate ratio of PR practitioners in an organization to consumers, and the constant need to keep abreast of technological advances to communicate with our audience. Let's move away from this initial reluctance to embrace technology, for the benefits are many. Ultimately, when our organization becomes a UUF citizen or Twitterian, we become more approachable to our fellow citizens, earn their trust, build relationships and improve our products/services from their feedback.
As PR practitioners, we are not alone in this journey to Planet Social Media. Many of us have made this trip before and succeeded! Join me every week as I come closer to discovering a whole new universe! Packed your bags yet?
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