Tuesday, November 20, 2007
Diggin Salesforce Ideas
byIn the Winter 08 release of Salesforce.com, the company brings its popular IdeaExchange to the public with Salesforce Ideas. The Digg-like service aims to give its customers an open forum for submitting ideas for product enhancements, feedback, and Q&A. Salesforce customers may include the system in their own websites where they can create communities for various topics as IdeaExchange recently did for Force.com developers with a special Force.com platform category.
As ideas are submitted to Salesforce Ideas, the community reviews and promotes (votes) those postings where they are in agreement. This crowdsourcing affect provides invaluable insight for company planners and marketers wishing to satisfy the greatest needs of their customers. With typical online forums, the loudest voice may have more influence even when the idea is less important to the community. Conversely, with Salesforce Ideas, popular and supported ideas peculate to the top of the community forum. Those entries with greater business value to the masses tend to get more attention and subsequently, they might be addressed with a higher priority.
Further, contributors get their own feedback from the community. If the idea is promoted, it may validate the original concern. Otherwise, entries may attract comments and alternatives that the original contributor was not aware of. Although this model seems obvious, this type of customer community collaboration is underused today.
Although Salesforce will charge a per user fee for the service, there are free alternatives. For example, Satisfaction is a free service for collaborating on ideas that has a Twitter feel to it.
Salesforce is expecting to have limited availability of Salesforce Ideas in early December and general availability in 2008.
