BrainStorm

Starbucks is the latest major brand to engage their consumers in an online conversation. Earlier this month the Cafe behemoth launched “My Starbucks Idea” a website that according to the site will “Help shape the future of Starbucks…with Your ideas”. On the site you can share your ideas, vote on other’s ideas, discuss the ideas with people from the online community and see which ideas are taking root and being carried into action.

On the surface this appears to be a good concept. But as John Moore of BrandAutopsy writes this could backfire because Starbucks has decided to jump full stream into social media before getting their feet wet. I was actually rather surprised when I visited the Starbucks website only to find there was no company blog at all! Is it true that Starbucks has not participated in an online conversation until now?

Better late than never.

Gathering consumer input through the use of a social media site like mystarbucksidea.com is nothing new and I assume some great insights will be brought forth. The thing that impressed me most from this site is that the “Idea Team” from Starbucks frequently interject into the conversation with comments about how they are putting these ideas into action. One post is from the user interface designer giving his inspiration for the design of the website. Great job humanizing Starbucks corp with the actual team involved in running the idea site on a day to day basis.

I’m a firm believer that brands can and should become more transparent by involving the people behind the scenes designing the products, marketing the services, hiring the talent in sharing the insights and methodologies used in the process. We’ll keep an eye out for this site to see if this is a nice marketing stunt or if Starbucks truly is committed to learning from the ideas of their customers.

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This entry was posted on Monday, March 31st, 2008 at 9:49 pm and is filed under Trends, Web 2.0, Social Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.