Hooray for crowd sourcing and all that it can achieve.  Starbucks, like a good number before has now embraced the web and allowed to gather and deliver a huge volume of ideas on how things at Starbucks across America could or should change.

Jon passed the me article on the BBC that caught his eye with this a while ago and I have been following the ideas storm of a while now and it is reach of what this idea is doing for Starbucks that is so compelling.

The OBVIOUS

1) It is giving Starbucks some good ideas about how to improve things for its customers .

Value - high

The Subtle

2) Which consumer organisation does not need positive promotion....So look at the free advertising and good will this is producing for the Starbucks brand around the web.

3) The ideas that Stabucks adopts may repair the down turn in fortunes, but the value in all the other ideas is that this is raw consumer language. This is how the hard core Starbucks customer thinks and talks. What other way can you think of to get 10,000;s of your customers to talk to you openly about what they think about you.

Value - high

The Fascinating

4) Every ideas has stimulated a dialogue around it, sometimes in the hundreds....this is the language of their customer....the voice of their customer come to them loud and clear. This is market research on a epic and very cheap scale.

5) The platform has now been created to broadcast targeted messages to the consuming public. I bet that Starbucks.com does not have the same open profile as the idea storm. Now if Starbucks wants to share a message efficiently with loyal customers, then they are actively talking on one place.

Value - Pretty high

So what the challenge.  Well keeping it going, less for the ideas and more for the dialogue platform will be a challenge.  The intelligence will be skewed by people who "like the sound of their own figures typing" thereby missing the "quite ones".    But in the round, for a very modest investment what a staggering return...

Not everyone has thousands of outlets from which millions of customers can be told about such a platform, but every business has a customer base and there are always mechanisms to garner their opinion...

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