Thoughts On Strategy: Facilitating Customer Innovation Online

• Innovation is nothing more than doing something new or something you have already done in a different way.
• Customer-driven innovation is the creation of ideas for doing something new from your customers.
• This has obvious applicability to online communication, community and collaboration!
• Track what people are saying about your company, organization, products and services online. Many ideas and new perspectives can be surfaced this way alone.
• Leverage existing customer communities anywhere on the Web when they are discussing how to improve your business.
• Determine how you can best engage your employees in this online conversation that is going on all around you. The more staff you have paying attention, the better a chance for new ideas to break through to you.
• Consider facilitating the generation, discussion, and evaluation of new ideas from your customers via interactive web sites. The case study below provides an example.
• Publicly calling for ideas from your customers conveys a promise: that you will genuinely consider them, indicate which you are going to pursue, and give credit where credit is due for the successes.
• The hardest part of sourcing innovation from customers is not going to be your customers. It is going to be getting your staff and organizational culture to incorporate them. Lay the groundwork and infrastructure to adopt great ideas before you ask for them from your customers.

Case Study: : Dell and Starbucks Customer Innovation Web Sites

Both Dell and Starbucks have launched web sites that ask their customers to suggest, rate, and discuss ideas on how to improve in any aspect of their company, operations, or products and services. Suggestions range from adding an extra shot to Venti sized lattes to ideas on being a more socially responsible global citizen. Both sites use Ideas, a service of Salesforce.com.

How are these sites different from a glorified suggestion box? Both are sponsored by the CEOs of each company, making them high profile projects internally. Each has staff dedicated to monitoring the site, responding to each entry, and taking ideas into the company for exploration. These are not trivial, feel-good, marketing campaigns. They have been designed as a key element of the overall innovation process for each company.

Dell has a dedicated blog, called Ideas in Action, where they report on the progress of ideas within the company and solicit feedback from the community of customers involved in the IdeaStorm web site. This is a great example of how the company shows its commitment to listening to their customers. It was also a critical step, given how Dell’s billion-dollar brand was bloodied by bloggers in the not-too-distant past.

This leads us to the key to success for this kind of effort: it starts within the company, rather than on the Web. If staff incentives and business processes are not redesigned to value and nurture this form of customer innovation, it will fail. Worse, publishing such a site without the organization firmly behind it reneges on the implicit promise to take the customer’s contributions seriously.

High Geekery: Occam’s Razor 2.0

The simplest solution online is often the best when interacting with customers. All you need to do to illustrate this is to complete a transaction on Amazon.com and then try to do the same on the web site of your telephone service provider. It’s rather obvious which company focuses on customer value and which does not, isn’t it?

This is even more important when you are trying to facilitate customer-driven innovation.

Take, for example, Proctor & Gamble’s effort in the late 90’s to use the web to allow customers to create their own custom cosmetics via a web site tied directly to an automated factory built just for this purpose. This was a very elaborate system to allow customers to innovate their own cosmetic colors and properties. It fell flat and was shut down at a huge loss a few years later. There were simply too many options for a normal person to pick from when all they wanted was good product from a brand they trust.

Now compare this to the simplicity of the Ideas application from Salesforce.com highlighted in the case above. Ideas are easily suggested, rated, and discussed. The company publicly responds to them, and everyone moves on, with the best ideas being implemented. The cost of a bad idea in this system is very low and good ideas are surfaced without strenuous effort. All with a simple, easy-to-use interface. This is Occam’s Razor 2.0 in action.

Thoughts On Strategy: Going International

• A Brit, working in Switzerland at a multinational scientific research organization, invented the Web to help his colleagues easily share the results of their research from anywhere on the globe. The Web has been, and always will be, a global communications platform.
• 20% of the world’s population has access to the Web as of December 2007.
• 50% of the world’s population has cell phones.
• Asia (including India and China) has the lowest percentage of population online but the greatest number currently online.
• Internationalized systems support deploying content and services in multiple languages and support gathering data and payment in different formats and currencies.
• Localization is the process of applying content, design and functionality to an internationalized system in order to address the needs of a country or region whose people share common cultural, economic, and linguistic attributes.
• Not all web site audiences are created equal. Focus your efforts on serving those with the highest potential value to your outcomes.
• Being truly global means being local everywhere. Do your homework, focus on your highest value audiences and build your international offerings over time.

Case Study: The Chinese Olympic Committee

The Chinese Olympic Committee is the body that won the 2008 Summer Olympics for China. They have deployed two sites as the country prepares for the big event later this year. One is in English and the other, naturally enough, in Chinese. They provide a good example of an organization developing two different presentations of their brand and information to two broadly differing audiences.

The English language site, en.olympic.cn, is clearly targeted to the entire world outside of China. It is in English and provides links to resources, information and headlines for anyone interested in the Olympics in China. Notice that the colors, although featuring some red, use more orange, blue and white.

The Chinese site, www.olympic.cn, is completely written in Chinese except for a link to the English language site and some roman numerals that count down the days until the Games begin. The color red is predominant and Communist Party iconography is much more in evidence. It is also a much more polished presentation and design compared to the English language site.

A few things to note:

• The two sites have different designs and content, tailored to the outcomes and audiences for which they were created.
• The navigation bars had to be structured differently, even if the sections were the same, due to the varying sizes of Chinese and English characters.
• The one consistency between the two sites is the branding of the Chinese flag, Olympic Rings and the name of the organization in Chinese and English. This is the one visual element that ties the two together as part of the same organization.

By bifurcating their audience in this way the Committee is able to provide tailored information and design to their domestic audience and a different presentation and language to everyone else. This simple approach allows the home country visitors to have a culturally (and politically, I’m sure) tailored experience while the rest of the world can access foreign-targeted content in a generally more accessible language. However, the English language content still carries a very identifiable political spin to news and events, as the torch relay of the past month has triggered protests around the world.

High Geekery: Machine Translation

Machine translation of language is not anywhere near ready for prime time use. Executives everywhere are tempted by the low cost of machine translation when compared to hiring a human to do it. However, as in so many cases, you get what you pay for when you take the road less costly.
For example, using the venerable Babel fish web site to translate the home page of the Chinese Olympic Committee leads to the following headline in English:

“The badminton champion lucky new huge mythical bird and the numerous stars sings refuels China.”

Who knew badminton birdies have a role in the energy markets?

If it’s worth translating, it’s worth hiring a human to do it. If you cannot justify the expense, increase the value of what you are trying to achieve online or simply stick with your native language.

New Offerings from David

Here are a few new resources and events from C. David Gammel:

• Article: Web Design Implications for Translated Web Sites
• Blog Post: Why Heathrow’s Terminal 5 Failed Miserably
• David is moderating a panel on building community and collaboration with global customers. The panel is in New York at the BDI Global Communication conference on Tuesday May 13.