Social media strategists and consultants should take a good look at the Salesforce platform as a complement to activities like blogging, twitter, and facebook. Until I spoke with John Durocher, a VP at Salesforce who specializes in the Financial Services Industry, I thought of Salesforce as strictly a CRM product. But what Salesforce is doing with their Ideas application–and their cloud computing approach, could be the next level of customer engagement.
According to Vida Killian, Dell’s IdeaStorm manager, Dell’s Digital Media Vision is to “engage in relevant conversations with out customers online, 24/7, worldwide in all major languages.” After some initial missteps, Dell began blogging and working to engage customers in the social media space with their Direct2Dell blog launched in June 2006. IdeaStorm was launched earlier this year as an augmentation of Dell’s social media strategy to move from one to one conversations to one to many collaboration opportunities.
IdeaStorm provides Dell customers with the opportunity to suggest improvements to the product and see those suggestions become a part of the product development cycle. To date, over 10,000 ideas have been generated and a visit to the site will show what ideas are currently bubbling to the top of the list.
The video below gives a very quick (1 minute) view of how IdeaStorm works to move ideas into reality:
[youtube]Y0SOXW_K56w[/youtube]
Salesforce has launched a number of demo and early implementation sites using the Ideas application. Dell’s IdeaStorm and MyStarbucksIdea are the first sites to fully implement what Salesforce describes (perhaps too “corporatistically”) as “community in a box,” but if we leap past the rather non-organic connotations of that moniker, we find the proof is in the practicality that these sites are working to serve their purpose: generating ideas from the user community.
It is probably too early to tell if these applications are working, but what I find intriguing is how the Salesforce approach offers the potential to leapfrog over many implementation details and get a relevant conversation started quickly.
John compared what Salesforce is doing with applications as akin to an iTunes store for applications–the AppExchange allows a business to quickly try out applications to see if they were effective or not and then move on to others. That sounds expensive, but then consider how expensive it is to “dabble” in social media. My favorite caveat I’ve learned is that new media initiatives are “easy to start, but hard to finish.” It takes about an hour to get a blog started. But then, you realize that the theme you chose is not so great and you want to customize things a bit so you start messing around with the css. You download a bunch of plugins and maybe even edit the php code a bit because you need it to do something differently. When you are doing this in the comfort of your home as a fun learning experience, it’s no big deal. But when it becomes work…and people are not just reading it but wanting to know if it is working…it’s not so easy after all.
I think Salesforce is different from just “better tools.” There are plenty of products out there designed to allow “non-technical” people to make web things. In the web 1.0 world it was all about creating a WYSIWYG web page editor. In web 2.0 maybe it was Drupal. But ultimately, you find the people maintaining the sites are either technical or became pretty technical pretty fast because they needed to.
Instead of asking communicators to become programmers…or trying to build the perfect tool set for them…what if we could create simple plug in applications to do certain clearly defined tasks? OK, IdeaStorm may not be as “authentic sounding” as a blog by a product manager engaging in one-on-one conversations with customers…but it is more likely to be effective, certainly in larger organizations where the challenge is how to integrate so many smaller ideas into a larger product. Ideastorm may not provide the direct connection that some support rep twittering and fixing your problem on the fly does. But isn’t it the next level? Isn’t this the essence of truly and authentically involving customers and developers in the process of creating products that truly meet their needs?
I’m also excited by the potential community/government uses for these apps. When I set up WestwoodBlog I chose the Drupal platform mainly because I thought I would be getting multiple residents to blog as they do at myDedham. I wanted more community “plumbing” than Wordpress offered a year ago. But as I start to think about how my site could play a larger role in improving town communication, I run into two types of limits:
- Time – I need to keep my editorial voice going, I need to invest time to keep my “ear to the ground,” and do behind the scenes activity to encourage involvement.
- Technology – I need to turn myself into a Drupal developer to get some features I’d like to have. How about a simple form to report a streetlight out? I’m sure Drupal has some ugly UI-challenged way to do that, but even if I don’t do any real programming work, it is not something I can just “try out.”
Salesforce makes their platform available to nonprofits for free. There is still solution architecting work to be done, but it would be a great abstraction to be able to say, ok, turn on the trouble-ticketing system for that…or use the ideas application to gather input for pedestrian and bike saftey. I will have to investigate further and see if there is something I can use here.
To take it a step even further…this is the kind of development we need to make large scale cooperation work. I can foresee so many initiatives becoming bogged down in the detail of running a blog and keeping up with community management issues. I suspect this kind of software approach could save tons of time and money in projects like what Boston World Partnerships is doing to create a community to promote economic development in Boston.
I don’t think there is really such a thing as a “community in a box,” but it would make a lot more sense to serve specific functions with specific applications than to try to extend the conversational value of social media too far into implementation details. A blog is not the ideal place to report a broken streetlight because the tendency will be to simply talk more about it and no one will likely go fix it. Pretty soon, people get tired of just talking. Integrated applications could deliver the results that make conversation meaningful and relevant to customers and constituents.
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I read this post a while ago and recently thought of it and specifically, you’re point of, “I don’t think there is really such a thing as a ‘community in a box,’” when I read this in Federal Computer Week: http://fcw.com/blogs/insider/2009/03/assessing-virtual-town-hall.aspx
Thought there were some great points about some of the difficulties with applying the IdeaStorm technology to government use: “Think about it this way. Most choices in policy are essentially an “alternatives analysis” — a choice between different but well defined solution possibilities. What is happening in whitehouse.gov is that the public is being asked to create and compare an almost infinite number of choices.”
I know I’m not the first to state that one of the main points or things to realize in using any of these tools is that they are just tools. You still need people behind them creating the connections, facilitating discussion, etc..
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