Dropping Your Website off at College

Enterprise 2.0 is about soliciting your users (i.e. employees and customers) input and feedback to make your business better. It's about letting go of the reigns. Dropping your company's intranet/website off at college and saying "Now it's your turn, show me something I never could have expected". Just like any freshman, you will have to deal with their "sea legs" (i.e. the first few months while they figure out the balance between studying and fun). Once you get through it, you have an intelligent, independent minded attitude that you can draw from to make your business better.

Dell recently let go of the reigns with their IdeaStorm initiative. IdeaStorm is a blogging facilitiy on Dell.com that allows customers to suggest ways to make Dell better. The result? Angry posts about frustrations with offshore call centers. Complaints about flaming Laptop Batteries. But they left these posts out there, warts and all. The result? Credability. More people started posting. Some brilliant ideas emerged, one of which was to encourage Dell to support Linux on some of their desktop models. It was a suggestion Dell listened to which inevitably opened up an entire new share of the market to them. It was an idea so good that HP recently copied it. Thanks to Dell's willingness to drop their website off at college, they are ahead of the curve and their Linux sales are growing. Flickr's implementing the same request-for-enhancement model with Flickr Ideas. (by the way this model can apply to any product or sevice you have, online or offline, contact me to show you how).

So let go of the leash. It's hard for all parents, but we all know in the end we'll get something better on the other side than we could have possibly hoped for. Trust your users. You've done a good job over the years making sure they're part of the right crowd. It's time to see what they can do.