PUBLIC MARKS from dimelo with tags en & contexte

“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.

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.

there are some pretty fundamental changes happening to the way we do business. Driving all these changes is the notion that innovation happens faster when you open up and let the whole world help you - and if you can harvest that innovation your company will win out. This is happening now because the internet provides the platform (really the virtual space) which makes mass collaboration possible.

While the window on using the "2.0" suffix is probably closing, I thought it would be worthwhile to explore an especially significant trend in 2006 that will likely see much more widespread uptake in 2007.  Specifically, I'm talking about building highly competitive online products by turning over non-essential control to users directly via the Web.  For now, I'm calling this online business trend "Product Development 2.0", a concept that embodies the use of Web 2.0 concepts such as harnessing collective intelligence, users as co-creators, and turning applications into platforms, three of the most powerful techniques in the Web 2.0 arsenal.

For the launch of their new hatchback model, the Auris, Toyota Hellas wanted a digital campaign that would promote the new car's interior design and the feel drivers get when sitting inside the Auris' modern "cockpit". The campaign needed to actively engage consumers with the brand, to generate leads and "test-drive" requests.

By and large, executives are satisfied with their previous investments in Internet technology, and most are investing in trends that promote automation and networking online.

Welcome to the Delta community. See how we're changing travel. Share your ideas and tips. Let's make travel better. Together.

Dell is doing this because of your clear feedback in IdeaStorm. User dhart submitted this idea on February 16—the first day we launched IdeaStorm and it quickly became the #1 idea. Since then, about 30,000 community members weighed in to support it, and over 100,000 of you completed the Linux survey to tell us more.

Bottom line, I believe in communicating with the customer, and the internet gives me a whole new way of doing that on a global scale. I’d rather engage directly in dialogue with you because that’s how we learn and grow as a company. So tell me what you think, and together we’ll keep Marriott on the Move!

Yesterday, Forrester released some results from a December 2006 survey of 119 CIOs at mid-size and larger companies. It indicated that Web 2.0 is being broadly and rapidly brought into enterprises. Fully 89% of the CIOs said they had adopted at least one of six prominent Web 2.0 tools - blogs, wikis, podcasts, RSS, social networking, and content tagging - and a remarkable 35% said they were already using all six of the tools.

The EIU survey also indicates that these executives have formed quite strong opinions about where 2.0 will impact most strongly. Over 75% of them report that the greatest impact from 2.0 will come in “the way my company interacts with customers.” Approximately 40% report that they see strong impacts coming in the way their company is viewed by customers and in the way employees interact with each other and the enterprise. And 40% also report that they see 2.0 impacting their business models.

I think we might have taken that kind of CRM as far as possible for the time being. We have all kinds of CRM systems today that systematize and organize our customer facing processes, but what we lack right now are effective ways of capturing customer feedback. With feedback we can know whether or not we're on the right track earlier than the time when we first put a product on the market, and that kind of information serves to save money and improve our business processes in immeasurable ways. So, no offense to my friends who think that social networking is a separate activity, but I really think it's our space.