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

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

Using Facebook to build your online business community is great, however for many business owners, having too much of their information shared is still holding them back from using Facebook.  

Facebook is working on new privacy control settings that will give people simple control of all information shared.

Here is how Facebook’s New Privacy Controls will work, illustrated in a simple screen capture.

I am curious as to how long this privacy control settings will last and who will eventually get the upper hand: Facebook or Facebook Users?

Many people I meet are afraid to use social media because they are not sure about what they should be communicating about, so here are some ideas:

Please share your ideas for communication