From Dell to Starbucks:From Ideastorm to My Starbucks Idea

A lot of discussion on organisations using social media as a tool to manage customer relationships has moved around companies using the same for brand visibilty and giving the customers a platform to interact and share, but failing to actually engage customers-as in closing the loop by actually showing the consumer what the company did with those ideas.

Looks like Starbucks was listening-
My Starbucks idea is the response.

As Jeff Jarvis had once rightly said that customers would have conversations about a company, products and services. It hence made more sense for the company to become part of these conversations. A series of branded online communities and corporate blogs followed suite.Starbucks apparently has gone a step forward.By providing a space for consumers to share their thoughts, let others vote on those thoughts and create a point system to rate ideas, it has actually made a concious effort to work on the consumer relationship.

Social media non-believers have screamed in the past about the inability of the medium to clearly showcase what the companies were doing with the consumer feedback or how the same was being leveraged.

This is a case in point!!!!!