With All Else Failing, Starbucks Tries Social Media
With Starbucks' stock beaten down from its mighty highs of $47 to recent lows of $17 in the face of strong competition from Peet's, Caribou, McDonald's, and Dunkin' Donuts and a suffering economy, the coffee house chain has made many changes over the past few months. From eliminating jobs and reshuffling management to permanently shutting down lagging stores and retraining its baristas, perhaps none of these moves will be as important or effective in the long run as the development and launch of My Starbucks Idea.
This is a guest post by Muhammad Saleem, a social media consultant and a top-ranked community member on multiple social news sites.
No, I don't mean my idea personally (although I do have some ideas for the company), but rather the collective ideas of every Starbucks loyalist, hopped up on caffeine. Simply put, My Starbucks Idea is a socially driven marketplace for Starbucks-related ideas that will help the company reinvent itself.
You know better than anyone else what you want from Starbucks. So tell us. What’s your Starbucks Idea? Revolutionary or simple -- we want to hear it. Share your ideas, tell us what you think of other people’s ideas and join the discussion. We’re here, and we’re ready to make ideas happen. Let’s get started.
All you need to do to participate is sign up on the site using a username, password, and an email address. Once you're logged in, you can post your idea in one of 13 categories:
Every posted idea immediately shows up in the recent ideas queue, where it is voted on in a Digg-style manner. If it gets enough votes, it gets 'promoted' to the popular ideas list and top all-time list, from which Starbucks employees and management pick the best ideas to actually implement in stores. If your idea catches someone's eye, it will be labeled as **under review**, and if they actually decide to implement it, you will see a **coming soon** tag next to the idea.
A complete list of ideas that are going to be implemented can be found in the ideas in action section of the site.
Overall, the site is an absolutely great idea. In many ways it is very similar to Dell's IdeaStorm which I similarly praised. Every company could benefit from its own implementation of a socially driven marketplace for ideas, especially major consumer brands such as Starbucks and Apple, which have developed an incredibly loyal core following. Such marketplaces can help companies capitalize on the passions of their their most important fans and deliver on the promises of the next big thing without huge research budgets.
My Starbucks Idea has been a huge success so far, just like Dell's IdeaStorm before it. Approximately a month after launching, the site has gotten a plethora of great idea submissions from Starbucks-lovers, and the most popular submissions have gotten tens of thousands of points (votes) and hundreds of comments. As long as Starbucks keeps letting the community freely voice its opinion and keeps implementing the crème de la crème of the community's ideas, the company has nothing to lose and everything to gain.
Disclaimer: I own Starbucks stock.
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How about a simple mag stripe card that has my order on it - which is has been the same everyday for over ten years?!?!?!
Post script - Please vote my idea up:
http://mystarbucksidea.force.com/ideas/viewIdea.apexp?id=087500000004QNH
KTHXBAI
Regarding the wisdom of Crowds, if you want to submit requests and vote for features in Atlassian products you can do so at jira.atlassian.com. This has been around for 5 years. It's not nearly as slick looking or easily accessible for non-developers, nor is it general interest like Starbucks, but still, it's been immeasurably beneficial to get honest feedback (pros, cons, rants, raves) from our customers and display it transparently for anyone interested.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts on Starbucks' social media strategy. While I think it's a good first step, I think they have a long way to go. I had written about this strategy earlier as well, and I think it's only going to be successful if they take a long-term view of intentionally listening to customers and acting on their suggestions when appropriate.
http://www.viget.com/engage/starbucks-brews-a-social-media-strategy/
Well, all I know is that I posted three ideas on the website the first day it went up. Unfortunately, then I looked at other people's ideas and found a lot of repetition. But if they could only do the top options (frequent customer "points" and recycling), I'd be happy even if dozens of us suggested the same ideas.
It's a straightforward idea, but how strategic is it really? Consider a couple of points:
1. Most of those making suggestions are current Starbucks customers. What the company needs most is *new* customers. I don't see much on the suggestion board about how they can do that.
2. Most of the suggestions and those the company has already said it will implement involve giving things away that current customers used to pay for. I thought the idea was to reignite revenue growth, not reduce them.
Nonetheless, I'm all in favor of listening to your customers.
There's a rather major bit of information missing here: Both My Starbucks Idea and Dell IdeaStorm are built on Salesforce.com's White Label Ideas Platform:
http://www.salesforce.com/salesforceideas/
So the reason they're similar is because they're built on the same thing, a product which was in turn built off Salesforce's IdeaExchange:
http://ideas.salesforce.com/
So yes, any company can have such a system for themselves, as they can purchase it from Salesforce.com.
@#1 and #2- You should have checked the site before submitting your "great idea", because it was already submitted (unoriginal and repetitive.
@7- Exactly, the interesting detail (for RWW readers) is that this was built on SF's IdeaExchange.
To All, expecially the author, 99% of the submissions are from Starbuck's EMPLOYEES (Partners), NOT CUSTOMERS (though one could argue they are customers too).
Starbuck's will learn, as did Dell, the excitement only lasts for so long and requires waaay too much effort for the customer to supply feedback (Dell's site is a ghost town now). At least it is a nicer site than Starbuck's home site, ew!
@#1 and #2- You should have checked the site before submitting your "great idea", because it was already submitted (unoriginal and repetitive).
@7- Exactly, the interesting detail (for RWW readers) is that this was built on SF's IdeaExchange.
To All, expecially the author, 99% of the submissions are from Starbuck's EMPLOYEES (Partners), NOT CUSTOMERS (though one could argue they are customers too).
Starbuck's will learn, as did Dell, the excitement only lasts for so long and requires waaay too much effort for the customer to supply feedback (Dell's site is a ghost town now). At least it is a nicer site than Starbuck's home site, ew!
@#8 and #9 You should have checked this site with a page refresh before hitting the submit button a second time - nice double post.
I did try to search the Starbucks site for my idea before submitting it, no robust search available. I assumed the same request was already made and hope Starbucks finds the duplicate requests tedious to aggregate.
"nice double post"....that's a good one. Any other original commentary?
I had checked out this crappy Starbuck's site previously, and noticed "your idea", no searching required.
You don't have to explicitly search if your goal is to help Starbuck's better. If that is your goal, you would WANT to read what others submitted already. But you're a glory hound.
I simply wasn't so presumptuous as to think my idea was original leaving me eager to run off and show "what good ideas I have".
@tommyboy While there is no doubt that some of the submissions on the Starbucks site are from partners, I seriously doubt more than 50% of them are. Starbucks Partners have their own site to submit ideas:
https://www.starbucks.com/mystarbucksidea/partner_login.aspx
@Dan, please point out other articles you've commented on besides this one. You have none, you schilll.
MyStarbcksIdea is all "Partners" aka employees. They need to think they matter, so they try to matter. They (You) do not.
go back to the gossip blog schmuck.
tommyboy, stop flaming.
idiot.
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