Companies and their online community join forces to share and generate ideas, find new inspirations, and create new products and services.  

“Crowd Sourcing” and “Co-Creation” are terms that are used to describe this method, whereby social media tools involve customers and other online community members in the innovation process.  

Symnetics posted an excellent presentation about it: 

If you are unable to view the presentation click here 

Some more inspirational examples of “crowd sourcing” and “co-creation” are:
• Starbucks My Starbucks Idea.
• Dell Ideastorm allowing users to suggest and vote on ideas
• Salesforce.com IdeaExchange has generated over 8,300 ideas
• Oracle Oracle Mix. 

Any company : Large , medium or small-size can use the “crowd sourcing” and “co-creation” method to improve their service offering and products in a creative way

 Suggestionbox.com  is an example of a free social media platform that enables this. 

If you would like to contact me, you can do so by visiting my LinkedIn page or emailing me at info@tag-on.com

Are you listening to what your customers are saying about you and your services on social media sites? Three simple steps:

Step 1: Based on your objectives – decide what you are going to measure.

 Step 2: Select monitoring tools 

Step 3: Evaluate and respond on a personal level

facebook page corcoran real estate

You can find them on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Foursquare(), and Gowalla(), among other sites. And if you need more, you can download their iPhone app, where you can find nearby homes for sale or rent and open houses. The app also promotes their Twitter, Facebook and YouTube pages. If you dig a little deeper, you can also find Corcoran on Tumblr(), Blip.tv and Vimeo(). Simply put, Corcoran has found a way to be everywhere for its clients. This is the first step to converting fans and followers into buyers and sellers.

As a lifestyle brand, Corcoran doesn’t simply create a presence, they participate in it. For example, the Corcoran YouTube channel features CEO Pam Liebman answering questions posed by Facebook and Twitter followers regarding the state of the housing market and New York living tips. Furthermore, Shadbolt proactively leaves local neighborhood tips on Foursquare and Gowalla for users to find.

Source: http://mashable.com,

As new ways of online communication emerge and evolve, new rules are made. Here are some examples of the unwritten rules of Social Media marketing that are followed by successful companies.

So rather than pushing stuff out to customers, Its all about having your customers want to come to you.

Jeff Bullas describes how publishing useful and relevant content in (blogs, videos etc) and using various powerful tools to get the message out ( linkedin, twitter, facebook and more) are fundamental for attracting those people who want to follow you and want become your customer.

According to Mike Clough  from BestbizPractices , the vast majority of successful individuals and companies that use social media also adhere to these rules and etiquette:

• No Advertising – If you post anything that appears to be an ad or some sort of self-promotion, particularly it if is for profit, you are likely to be called out as a “spammer” and shunned by those to which you wish to market.
• Pay It Forward – “Be of service” to others seems to be a universally held value by social media participants. If you build good “web karma,” later, when you need assistance, there will be plenty available.

If you would like to contact me, you can do so by emailing me at info@tag-on.com

I went to the Marcom10 conference last week in Amsterdam and followed an interesting session about Social Media Strategy given by Hans van der Meulen from WDM.
WDM conducted a survey in the Netherlands (Social Media Barometer) to understand the average usage of Social Media by Dutch people.

Some interesting insights were surprisingly the low number of people that actually use Twitter in the Netherlands (6%) , the large number of people using Hyves on a daily basis, the increasing number of people using Facebook, and the relatively large number of people reading blogs (30%).

Seeing these numbers only strengthens my opinion on focusing on creating a sensible strategy for reaching your customers , whilst using the social media tools that they use too.