Starbuck’s Taps the Crowd for Ideas
The tech blogosphere is abuzz with the news coming out of Starbucks. No, it’s not a new double chocolate extra caffeinated new coffee drink that’s causing the buzz. The buzz is around Starbuck’s new website called My Starbucks Idea that asks the crowd to give them ideas on how they can make Starbucks better. They use a simple share, vote, discuss and see method.
Makes sense, people share their ideas, the crowd votes and discusses the idea and then Starbucks shows them which of the ideas it’s taken and implemented. So far, it seems like the two most popular ideas is a frequent buyer card and free wireless internet at Starbucks. From the looks of it, the Starbucks community managers need to get in there and merge some of the ideas which are the same. How many Starbucks frequent buyer ideas do I need to see?
They did make a comment on the blog for My Starbucks Idea that says members of the Starbucks staff are commenting on the ideas and asking questions to get even more feedback about what customers really want. This type of engagement is great with a community. However, it does require you to actually be responsible and listen to what the users have to say. Stop listening and you’ll start a firestorm that you won’t enjoy.
This idea isn’t all that unique. Dell has been doing it for a few years now under what they call Dell IdeaStorm. More on Dell’s program another time. For now, Starbucks should be commended for reaching out to the avid Starbucks community for feedback. Starbucks almost cult like following is certainly a great brand that will benefit from engaging the crowds.
March 22nd, 2008 at 11:44 am
[...] CrowdSource This there is a really interesting post about the new My Starbucks Idea. It’s always great to see big companies using technology. Certainly Starbucks took a lot of [...]