Bridging the Industrial Age Gap

Let’s face it. For people involved in a brick-and-mortar business (both customers and employees), the concept of participatory social media is at first a little weird. There appear to be two reasons for this:

1. It’s new. Any brick-and-mortar business’s community has grown accustomed to interacting in-person. The idea of conversing online with people from a physical business is new and at first a little weird.
2. It goes against 200 years of history. For all of our talk about “transparency” and “social justice,” most of us are still grandchildren of the industrial revolution, which told businesses that customers are pawns to be manipulated and told customers that businesses cannot be trusted.

And yet social media is clearly an important part of many marketing strategies – even for brick-and-mortar businesses. So to get social media going within a customer community, it is clear that a business must make over-the-top efforts to undo that history. Starbucks is an example of one company that seems to have successfully bridged the gap between their brick-and-mortar business and online social media push with the launch of MyStarbucksIdea.com – which currently has over 55,000 customer-submitted ideas for product, service and company improvements.

Reaching Out With Abandon
In March, Starbucks kicked off the campaign to reach out to customers. I wrote about the initial media reaction earlier in the year, but thought it might be interesting to see some of the methods they used to bridge the gap between their in-store customers and a social media site. The important thing to note, in my opinion, is that Starbucks went full steam ahead to overcome 200 years of divided history in order to convince their customers that they were really interested in their feedback by placing banners, suggestion cards, and even signs on the trash barrels – one of which was photographed by a friend of mine. I’ve included the photo here (click on it to see the writing):

Additionally, they let their employees know that they ought to promote the effort by letting customers know. Now to be clear, at the outset a lot of industry pundits were cynical about the effort, as i presume were customers who were stuck in the industrial revolution mindset. “Is Starbucks really looking for my idea – or is this just some sort of an advertising ploy?” But still the company persevered with their campaign despite the detractors.

Reporting Back the Results
Starbucks then began to answer the questions of detractors pretty directly by reporting back the ideas that had been implemented both online and in-store. A photo example of this was captured by http://flickr.com/photos/rbieber/2585014474/ , reporting in-store that a community-generated idea for a loyalty card had been implemented. Since then, there have been hints that a number of popular ideas are being considered or are coming soon on the site as well.

Any business looking to bridge this tough gap can learn a little from the Starbucks approach, i think.

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