The power of crowd sourcing
I’m in love with the idea of crowd sourcing.
If you’re not familiar, crowd sourcing is allowing a community to submit ideas to your organization and then lets the community vote on which ideas are it’s favorite. These ideas could be product development, product enhancement, or whatever your want. The sky is the limit when it comes what kind of ideas that you’re sourcing.
Dell does a great job with the Ideastorm community. A site that is run by a team of two, has amassed over 10,000 ideas, which have been voted on over 700,000 times! In a recent interview, they stated that their biggest challenge with Ideastorm is figuring out how to disperse all of these ideas to the appropriate people at Dell. In my opinion, that’s a good challenge to have.
Another fine example of crowd sourcing from Starbucks is My Starbucks Idea. Following the exact model as Ideastorm, it’s help Starbucks engage it’s customers in powerful new ways.
When a new user navigates the the My Starbucks Idea site, their greeted with the following message -
“Help shape the future of Starbucks - with your ideas. You know better than anyone else what you want from Starbucks. So tell us”
That is powerful powerful stuff. Starbucks users are made to feel that they have a role in shaping the future of Starbucks and not just through purchasing. Users are alos able to see, which of their ideas, if any, were adopted by Starbucks.
What companies would you like to see crowd sourcing your ideas? What ideas would you suggest?
Posted by Jeremy Hilton on Feb. 25, 2009
Comments
Thanks T!
When Alex Zelenak was in the conceptual phase of the Social Enchilada design, we tasked him with giving it a twist. Something that would set this design apart from traditional blog design. Hence the sidebar.
You’re not the first to comment on this, so I guess we succeeded.
To answer your question, Social Enchilada is built on Expression Engine. This includes the commenting system. However, I had to do some template trickery to allow multiple comment threads on a single page.
I’m glad you like it!
Posted by Jeremy Hilton on 02/26/2009 11:41 AM
I’m digging the sidebar positioning of your blog comments. What blog tools are you using for the social enchilada?
Posted by Tara on 02/25/2009 06:29 PM