Page 357 - Social Media Marketing

the objective is the association of Coke with NCAA sports, accomplished by linking 335
the brand with the crowdsourcing application built around the NCAA fan experience.
In the case of Refresh, the business objective is linking the brand—Pepsi—with the ■ ╇ S ocial A pplications D rive E ngagement
causes of its participants through a corporate social responsibility program directed not
through an internal committee but directly and transparently through a crowdsourcing
application.

Why This Matters in Business

Directly involving customers, stakeholders, potential customers, and others in appro-
priate collaborative activities conveys to these participants a sense of ownership and
control—a stake in the brand, so to speak—that is not possible in a read-only context.
Not only does crowdsourcing offer the potential of better outcomes— as defined by
those who participate in such programs—but also further moves these same partici-
pants “up” the engagement ladder, ultimately toward brand advocacy.

Ideation

Ideation—a derivative of crowdsourcing built around generating, organizing, and apply-
ing fresh ideas to a specific set of business or organizational challenges—is a form of col-
laboration that warrants special attention. Unlike the marketing-oriented applications of
social technology, ideation often drives directly at the operations side of the business.

Ideation platforms are a powerful class of social applications that lend them-
selves to both business management (for example, process, product, or service inno-
vation) and the quantitative assessment of outcomes. Customer-driven ideation—the
specific practice of pulling customers into the business-design process—is important
on at least two fronts. First, as noted it is a source of innovation and competitive dif-
ferentiation. When you’ve been making the same thing for years and years, certain
established practices begin to shape every decision. Getting some fresh eyes—and in
particular the eyes of the people buying your product or service—applied to rethinking
these accepted processes can be really beneficial.

Second, by opening up at least part of the responsibility for collective thinking
outside of the current thought leaders, the entire pool of ideas is expanded, driving
not only product and service-level change but also process change. Along with better
“things” come better ways to make those things. These are exactly the results noted
by Starbucks, Dell, Germany’s Tchibo, and Intuit’s Small Business community, all of
whom are using the ideation platforms as ways to improve their respective businesses
by forging collaborative relationships with their customers.

What really makes an ideation platform work is not the “idea solicitation” per
se. After all, how many people really believe that anything actually happens as a result
of an anonymous note dropped in a suggestion box? The problem with the classic sug-
gestion box—anonymous or not—is that the suggestion acceptance process and any