The Humbling Effect of Social Media

In March, Starbucks launched MyStarbucksIdea.com – putting itself in the humbling position of maintaining a site where customers could freely share their ideas, griefs and comments about the company very publicly with the world. It was a pretty risky move, to be sure. What if no one shared their ideas? What if all of the ideas and comments were negative? What if competitors – or even worse, employees – jumped into the fray and published scandalous information about the company?

I’m sure all of this has happened, of course. To make matters worse, though, the popular press panned the idea, initially calling it a “glorified suggestion box,” and a sort of empty publicity stunt. A lot of customers, too, felt that it was just a ploy from a corporate giant to generate advertising buzz. But Starbucks went ahead with the initiative, hiring 40 people to staff the site, and launching a month-long in-store and online campaign with posters, cards, employee education and advertising expressing their apparent desire to involve customers.

The once-proud Starbucks looked pretty darn bad – humbled – for the entire month of March.

In April and May, however, something changed. As Starbucks began to make good on their commitments and disprove their detractors, the customers began to trust and to join in, and to do it en masse. At current count (after 4 months), there are approximately 47,000 ideas in the system – with the top idea receiving 95,160 votes. In addition, the popular press has begun to be noticeably more positive.

After eating humble pie for a month and going with hat-in-hand to their customers to ask for their involvement, MyStarbucksIdea seems to be working.

Whether Starbucks can or will follow through on what they started by implementing the top ideas is yet to be seen, but one clear lesson for any organization is that,

though there may be initial apathy/suspicion/negativity toward a genuine effort by a business to involve customers, it needs to take the lead and prove its good intentions, then break through to the the other side where the real loyalty of grateful customers – and perhaps even the breakthrough result of runaway positive word-of-mouth awaits.

Customers at the Company Conference Table

Dell and Starbucks are showing serious commitment to online customer involvement a core part of their business—promoting the feature in their stores, on their websites, and through their employees. Starbucks has even added “idea partners”—48 specially trained employees who act as hosts of the discussion. Without them, Bruzzo (Starbuck’s Chief Technology Officer) argues, the conversation could intimidate newcomers. “These are the people at a dinner party who make sure everyone is having a good time.”

Here are a few quotes from a recent BusinessWeek article:

You could say this is nothing but a fancy suggestion box. Benioff (CEO of Salesforce.com, which provides the software to Starbucks and Dell) argues no. “The dead-end suggestion box and the auto reply are symbols of corporate indifference and are no longer tolerated,” he says. In this age of nonstop, immediate communication in blogs, wikis, Twitter, and YouTube, he says, “your customers are having a conversation about your products and practices. The question every company has to ask is: ‘Do I want to be part of this conversation? Do I want to learn from it? Am I willing to innovate on the basis of it?’ The idea partners also act as advocates for customers’ suggestions back at their departments, so that “customers would have a seat at the table when product decisions are being made,” Bruzzo says. “To close that loop in an authentic way,” he argues, the company must make a commitment to “building those ideas together with customers…. We’re truly going to adopt it into our business process, into product development, experience development, and store design.”"

Bruzzo advises other companies to follow Starbucks’ example in using Ideas. “Don’t underinvest in adopting it into your business process,” he implores. “See it as an important part of how you run your business.” He also says it’s O.K. to make mistakes. “Your community is incredibly forgiving, actually, if you show a real interest in listening and responding.”

A very important takeaway from this article is the commitment Starbucks has made to online social media and customer involvement. For them it is not just a gimmick or a “try and see,” but a new part of their business process. For small businesses, the specifics of the commitment to social media like BigTreetop.com will be different, of course (most small businesses cannot hire full-time “idea partners”), but the importance of that commitment will be the same – or perhaps greater, as they seek to find the unique advantages that they can use to compete with larger organizations. We’ve already seen that, with just a little bit of effort and a platform built for their purposes, small businesses can innovate rapidly and effectively with the help of their customers. I believe that the next generation of really successful small businesses will be the ones that band together to make customer outreach, involvement and innovation both in-person and online as much a part of their business philosophy and process as any other function.

Note: Here is another article about MyStarbucksIdea.com

Starbucks Takes Experience Seriously

Starbucks is one of the organizations most credited with starting “The Experience Economy,” where consumers care more about how they feel than how much they pay. After its stock recently fell by 40-something percent, Starbucks decided it was time to

“..close all of our U.S. company-operated stores to teach, educate and share our love of coffee, and the art of espresso. And in doing so, we will begin to elevate the Starbucks Experience for our customers.“

Just to be clear, in order to do this, Starbucks closed all of their U.S. stores today for three hours. Customers pay $3-5 for it in each daily cup of coffee. Starbucks today took a loss of millions for it. Experience is serious business.

http://www.starbucks.com/aboutus/pressdesc.asp?id=833