Addictive Stimulant + Social Network = Engaged Customers

Although it seems like you can't go anywhere without encountering the iconic Starbucks mermaid (except, of course, underwater) the company has been struggling of late. The economic downturn in the U.S. has consumers reconsidering whether they really need that $6 triple non-fat, low-foam cinnamon dolche latte every morning and afternoon, and are increasingly turning to the cheaper alternatives on offer from a resurgent McDonald's Corp.

Critics also say that the Starbucks Experience - the atmosphere of the store, the preparation and consumption of the beverage - has lost its magic in recent years as food and non-food items compete for attention with the core coffee-based drinks.

As part of a larger turnaround strategy, the company has turned to social media to re-engage their customers. At the company's recent annual shareholders' meeting, CEO Howard Schultz announced the launch of mystarbucksidea.com, a social media site designed to solicit ideas from Starbucks customer on what the company should be doing to recapture the "magic" of the coffee experience.

As this article explains, the benefit of this interaction is not so much the ideas that get generated (let's face it, many won't be that great or at all feasible) but the signal it sends: the company is listening to its customers.

To me, three about this site stand out:

• the ability to not only submit ideas to the site but share and discuss them with fellow customers

• the ability for visitors to vote for their favourite ideas, ensuring that the most popular are given consideration for implementation

• the "Ideas in Action" blog where Starbucks product managers discuss how they're bringing the best ideas to fruition, again demonstrating that the company is taking its customers and their suggestions seriously.
  

Mystarbucksidea.com is a great example in the B2C space of social media's effectiveness for connecting a company with its customers; I think there's a lot of potential for similar sites to improve the B2B customer interactions. B2B blogs are fairly common but tend to focus on establishing thought leadership in their industry (e.g. Cisco's Executive Thought Leadership blogs). One B2B community that comes close in concept to the Starbucks site is Intel's Open Port, where Intel customers and developers go to interact with Intel engineers and others in the wider IT community.

Are you a Starbucks fanatic, and did you share your Starbucks idea? Can you think of how a similar application could be applied successfully in the B2B space?


Read: Thousands of Posts Flood Starbucks Site