My Starbucks Idea (MyStarbucksIdea.com), a social media initiative launched by Starbucks in 2008, is an excellent example of crowd-sourcing; the process of the soliciting ideas and information from a wide group of people.

Through suggestions, ideas, discussion, feedback and other input given directly by its own customers, Starbucks was able to collect valuable and extensive information on three different fronts: product ideas, experience ideas and involvement ideas.

An online platform designed to collect as much feedback from customers as possible; My Starbucks Idea is perhaps one of the best examples of the need for business adaptability.

By turning customer feedback into business intelligence, Starbucks has been able to adapt to its customer base over time by using the pool of information created to enhance the company’s existing products and services, as well as to create brand new ones.

This is how Starbucks describes this initiative, in its own words: ‘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.’

This March 2013, the company is celebrating its fifth year anniversary, a period through which they have taken 275 ideas, materialized them and incorporated them into their business.

The initiative has not only helped the company enhance its business, but by tapping into customer feedback, Starbucks has also showed how much and how well it is willing to listen to its customers.

Showing a willingness to listen and take action upon feedback is a highly effective way for businesses to increase customer loyalty and brand reliability. This, in turn, is a great catalyst for attracting more and more customers.

Furthermore, My Starbucks Idea has not only acted as a platform to draw information from customers, but it has also grown into a vast online community where people can interact, share, discuss and vote for other ideas.

Allowing customers to interact with not only the company itself, but with each other as well, in a fun and engaging way to improve the overall business, is a very resourceful way to develop an increasing loyal customer base who enjoys interacting with your brand.

Moreover, brainstorming ideas and giving feedback on personal experiences with a brand allow for open, honest dialogue to take place between brand and consumers.

My Starbucks Idea is thus a transparency-driven effort that seeks to fit the current expectations of the emerging consumer: a transparency-seeking, conscious buyer who looks for the highest level of honesty and reliability in a brand.

Through the strategic arm of My Starbucks Idea, Starbucks has thus leveraged the value of collective intelligence and succeeded in transforming its customers into another wheel in its business, to enhance its brand image and overall business.

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The future’s office

The incorporation of technology in the workplace has already started taking place, but it is just the very beginning of what might be a workplace revolution.

With the explosion of innovative applications, workspace has the potential to be greatly extended through cyberspace. Social media, for instance, provides the possibility to create new workspaces in the office, including collaboration spaces such as Zoho, meeting spaces such as Skype, or social spaces such as Facebook. These online spaces, in turn, allow a business to expand its overall workspace in an unparalleled manner.

Mobile technology is also likely to play an increasingly central role in expanding the workspace through the inclusion of smartphones, tablets and other portable devices. As these are especially useful to connect to the office when outside of it, they can act as an extended arm of the office and allow office-based staff to interact and collaborate with external staff at anytime.

Next to social media and mobile devices, other growing technology such as Internet Protocol television (IPTV), augmented reality and projection technologies among other innovative tools have the potential to turn every corner of an office into workspace, and thus the workplace as a whole into a more efficient organism, where information is flowed within both quickly and efficiently.

As technology establishes more and more virtual bridges between collaborators; a more interactive workplace will emerge, one through which collaboration can be conducted more efficiently, but also one through which social interaction within an organization can be channeled more easily.

Whether one needs to reach a colleague, customer, supplier, freelancer or stakeholder each located in a different part of the world – the office of the future will need to integrate technology that will facilitate all these interactions by making virtual space become increasingly part of the physical environment, in a more natural and organic way.

The integration of technological tools within the workplace will, in turn, allow for the creation of high-performance teams in an unprecedented way, characterized by increased efficiency, productivity and cohesiveness.

This video by Microsoft http://www.microsoft.com/office/vision/ provides a glimpse of what the future of our offices could be. Although only a small part of the video is dedicated to the actual office, one can see how each individual is able to get connected to others instantly and from anywhere, and work together in one virtual space – which is fully integrated into the workplace. A work meeting is taking place in the video between one person in the office and two outside of it through a big-screen interactive interface at the office and mobile devices from those abroad.

We still have some way to go before actualizing Microsoft’s vision, but as technology advances, the office of the future may look even more tech-friendly than in this video. With the advent of holographic projection technology and augmented reality especially, incorporating virtual spaces within the workplace will not only become important, but necessary too.

Offices of the future will thus very likely need to be re-designed with this in mind. Employers, architects and interior designers will need to rethink the workplace so that the online and offline can be more integrated. The combination of offline physical space and online virtual space promises to revolutionize the workplace as technology moves forward, and as businesses increasingly use these innovations.

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Social media has gone from a simple way to connect with others to a full-fledged strategic resource for business.

On the 13th of June 2013, the Cavendish Conference Centre in London will host ‘Social Media Influence’, a dynamic one-day conference to discuss this further with some of the world’s key companies.

Unilever, Facebook, Microsoft and The Economist, among others, will be participating in the conference to talk about their own experiences of using social media within their business strategies.

Whether it is to engage in customer service, create internal communities, manage online reputation or promote and market a brand, social media provides many different business advantages that can no longer be ignored today.

Furthermore, as the sphere of social media platforms widen, the more business advantages are made available for companies to incorporate into their social media strategies.

Social media is not only becoming essential to business, but slowly revolutionizing it too.

A business revolution is indeed currently taking place, one that will see companies leveraging the power of social media thrive and one that will see those which do not lose their competitive advantage.

In the aim of discussing the ‘360 degrees of a social company’, the conference will touch on different facets of using social media in business, including the way employee engagement is being transformed by social media, the increasingly bigger place crowd funding and crowd sourcing are taking place in corporate decision-making and the way business marketing is being shaped by social media tools, among a range of other aspects.

The conference will also share some of the world’s best case studies of using social media efficiently in business to highlight ‘how social tools, technologies and thinking are shaping the next generation of successful companies and organizations’.

For the conference’s official website, please visit: http://socialmediainfluence.com/conference2013/

For more information about social media in business; join our online course www.SocialMediainBusiness.com/Learning

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The 2013 Web Summit that recently took place on the 1^st of March in London was a great channel for the growing importance of crowd funding, which it put forward through one of its key panels.

Crowd funding refers to the collective cooperation of individuals who each make a financial contribution towards a particular project they like or believe in – through online platforms.

This common financial effort, or crowd funding, is becoming an increasingly important source of capital for nascent ideas and start-up businesses.

Danae Ringelmann, co-founder of international crowd funding site Indiegogo and speaker at the Web Summit, says that crowd funding platforms are putting ‘money back into the creators’, which gives them the opportunity ‘to prove their worth’.

She adds that these social media tools allow ideas that are deemed worthy of funding to rise to the top, because the world wants them. This, in turn, creates  a ‘fairer financial ecosystem’.

Thus, it is no longer up to those who hold large financial capital to decide which direction the market should take by deciding on which projects to fund or to reject.

Today, with the rise of social media; everyone around the world can donate from as little to as much as they wish and invest in an idea they would like to see materialize.

In return for individuals’ financial involvement, funders can get some kind of remuneration directly from the creator such as a free product, a discount on a future purchase or even some involvement in the project itself.

If an idea however does not get crowd funded, Danae Ringelmann further explains, this means that ‘the world does not want it and that creators have the possibility to save both much time and perhaps life savings’ because they know beforehand if their idea has the potential to be successful or not.

Samir Desai, business strategist at Funding Circle and speaker at the Web Summit, explains that his organization allows people and organizations to lend money directly to small businesses.

He then asks: ‘How many people here hate banks?’, addressing the entire audience at the Summit. While hands are being raised, he makes the point that the system that we still use now – relying on the banking sector for funding – is not the only available funding model anymore with the flourishing of social media.

He further explains that having individuals fund new ideas through FundingCircle does not only help the creators, but also the funders themselves as the latter are able to make returns on their investments when ideas become successful.

Thus, the more funders spread their financial contributions across different projects, the more opportunity they have to make important returns on their different investments.

Danae Ringelmann ends up by saying that we are entering a ‘crowd funding revolution’ that is gradually ‘becoming a permanent piece of our financial ecosystem’. This, in turn, will ‘empower the world to fund what matters to them’.

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Crowd sourcing was one of key topics covered during the 2013 Web Summit, which took place on the 1st of March in London. Live-mapping and navigation application, Waze, was at the center of the crowd sourcing discussion.

The idea of crowd sourcing refers to the solicitation of ideas, services and information from a wide group of people, especially through online social media platforms.

By having each person make a small contribution, the general pool of information gets bigger, more reliable and more helpful – the overall result thus becomes much more interesting and useful.

Waze describes itself as ‘community-based traffic and navigation app. Nothing can beat real people working together’, the company writes. ‘Imagine 30 million drivers out on the roads, working together towards a common goal: to outsmart traffic and get everyone the best route to work and back, every day.’

By gathering real-time information from drivers, app users are able to access crucial information of the road situation directly from road-users, and make instant decisions as to which roads to take, which gas stations to stop by, which road hazards to avoid and traffic jams to circumvent, among other types of information.

Di-Ann Eisnor, speaker at the Summit and head of Waze’s US operations, says that the application is completely crowd sourced by its users, made up of an expanding user base of more than 40 million drivers thus far.

She further adds that this kind of system gets more and more interesting the more people there are, because crowd sourcing ‘needs crowds’ to operate as efficiently as possible.

Di-Ann Eisnor explains that the concept of crowd sourcing and Waze itself became considerably more valued in the aftermath of the Carmaggedon episode in 2011, during which a major route was shut over two days in Los Angeles.

During this event, Waze was pushed on the front scene by playing a significant role in providing real-time information and updates on traffic situations.

This episode led the Mayor, as well as many others, to realize that the ‘only way to keep track of traffic in real-time is crowd sourcing’, which allows immediate information to be given by and provided to millions of people.

Mobile technology is a big part of real-time crowd sourcing as it allows users to be connected at all times and send and receive information instantly. The more advances are made in this field, the more crowd sourcing opportunities will be made available.

Di-Ann Eisnor further says that this ‘mass participation’ trend will lead towards the development of ‘the smarter city’. ‘Smart cities are the future of crowd sourcing’, she says, which are characterized by a ‘truly mobile citizen’ and great connectivity.

Connected cities will have so much potential, according to Di-Ann Eisnor, and it is only a matter of time before we start reaching for it – a revolution that has already started.

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