Build your own “IdeaStorm” with UserVoice

Categories: Collaboration, Feedback, Social Media, Web ToolsPosted on May 2nd, 2008

Embrace your Customers
At Forrester, we use the term Embracing as a social strategy where customers and employees work together using social tools to build next-generation products. Quite a change for the strong headed product manager, who now has to set the roadmap, while in collaboration with customers.

Popular Examples: Dell and Starbucks
We’re all familiar with the popular Dell “Idea Storm” website that let customers vote for which features and products they wanted to be bore to the marketplace. In Dell’s case, the linux community asked for a UBUNTU box, which was created and launched and sold. I wish I was a fly on the wall when Dell’s strategic partners at Microsoft found out about this.

Recently, Starbucks has launched My Starbucks Ideas, where customers are voting for improved services or products in each of the stores. Looking at the site, the request for free wireless or ‘punchcards’ for frequent customers is under consideration or has been improved.

Both powered by SalesForce
Both of these sites are powered by Salesforce’s product, Ideas. Move on over, there’s a new player in town called UserVoice that offers the same features right on their site.

UserVoice, a new kid on the block
I’ve played around with UserVoice and even created a version for my own Web Strategy blog, the simple features made it easy to setup and let others submit ideas. I’ve not stress tested this service to see if it can withstand enterprise activity like SalesForce can, but it’s a nod to a common feature (voting) that we should start to expect to see in white label social networks. (in fact, I know of a few that are going to launch this)

Reporting, Query features, and easy to setup
Other UserVoice features to include Google Analytics, and the ability to collect demographic information and let owners know of suggestions. Owners of voting sites can also segment their customers by different purchasing sizes, in order to help prioritize. Also, polling features will help to put color around suggestions from users, and other conduits to improve the connectivity between employees and customers.

For example, I created this own Web Strategy UserVoice page where you can go and make suggestions on how I can improve this website.

Recommendations
If you’re a small company or individual blogger, or run a niche product, I encourage you to try out UserVoice, test to see how it scales, and come back and leave comments on your experience on this post. If you’re from a large company that has thousands or millions of customers, start with SalesForce and also trial UserVoice. Anyone that wants a fully custom user experience should start with SalesForce.

Update: I’ve received some tweets and comments also suggesting IdeaScale (which I think is the same as this product of the same name), I’ve not looked at it, please leave a comment if you’ve a review. Also, passionate CEO Matt from BrightIdea left a comment about his enterprise class competitor to SalesForce, I look forward to a formal Forrester briefing from him, let’s take a closer look at this growing segment.

What to Expect
UserVoice would make for a good partner for any of those white label social networks, and could even be an acquisition target for a vendor that’s not up to speed in this emerging feature set.

Expect other White Label Social Networking vendors to offer this feature, soon it will be on the ‘checklist’, of features. Customer voting? “Yup we got that.”

They aren’t the only ones to watch, Get Satisfaction, a support site for any product, anywhere, (no reason to go to that irrelvant corporate website) has launched, and customers are self-supporting each other, and some savvy companies have their employees there participating. Without surprise, I’m there representing Forrester, although there’s been no activity. Satisfaction is still very startup focused, I hope to see some Fortune 1000 companies appear on their site.

Lastly, UserVoice itself is, “eating their own dog food” so to speak, using their own service to improve their product, there’s already a small flurry of votes happening.

Share This Post:

This entry was posted on Friday, May 2nd, 2008 at 6:13 am and is filed under Collaboration, Feedback, Social Media, Web Tools. 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.

QuestionPro also has the same tool - I think for less called “IdeaScale” check that one out. I’m testing it right now with some clients.

Posted by Ivana Taylor on May 2nd, 2008 at 6:27 am

Thanks Ivana

Expect this feature to be found in most White Label Social Networking services.

Posted by jeremiah_owyang on May 2nd, 2008 at 6:31 am

Ivana

Here’s the URL

http://www.questionpro.com/ideascale/

Posted by jeremiah_owyang on May 2nd, 2008 at 6:33 am

Jeremiah,

In addition to the Salesforce.com applications for Dell and Starbucks, companies are also building their own idea generation features for their communities. An example of this is Cisco’s NetPro Community Idea Center (http://forum.cisco.com/eforum/servlet/NetProf?page=Idea_Center_discussion). Built using existing technology in place on the site, it also generated several good ideas for Cisco and the community at large.

As you state, this feature is quickly becoming a must have in the online community world. Several of our new clients have mentioned this at the outset of our discussions as a feature that they want to offer and specifically mention Dell’s Idea Storm. Good to see other vendors getting involved and offering a white label version…

Posted by Mike Rowland on May 2nd, 2008 at 7:09 am

Thank you Jeremiah for the kind words,
Just as an FYI, UserVoice is rolling out a host of new features this weekend -
• Admins may create as many suggestions as they want w/o spending their votes. This will let them import suggestions or “seed” the page with existing ideas.
• Redesigning the main suggestion page to promote our client’s brands above our own (it’ll just remain “powered by uservoice”).
• Major reworking to allow multiple suggestion pages per subdomain. This will allow companies to create topic-specific suggestion pages, categories, etc.
• Ability to embed a single suggestion in another page. Useful for referencing a suggestion when blogging about how you fixed it. *** Note: that this suggestion requires you to click-through before adding votes, comments, etc.

We’re about a week away from the “multiple suggestion pages,” but the rest of this list will be active within 24 hours. Stay tuned!

Posted by Marcus Nelson on May 2nd, 2008 at 7:18 am

hi @jowyang
saw your tweet on this - I’ve setup my own, but I am have problems with the response time on my website when I use the widgets on my blog

http://whatsup.uservoice.com/

Posted by martin english on May 2nd, 2008 at 7:39 am

Hi Martin, sorry about the response time! Are you certain it was the widget? The feedback widget loads after your page finishes, so it shouldn’t get in the way of your website’s performance. It looks snappy now, but let us know if you continue to have an issue so we can make UserVoice even better.

Posted by Lance Ivy on May 2nd, 2008 at 9:07 am

Now the real question Jeremiah: are you going to give the people what they want?

I feel some candid exploration of the local Jack in the Box is in your future.

Posted by Todd on May 2nd, 2008 at 9:43 am

Jeremiah- I agree completely that this trend is only going to grow dramatically. I love seeing companies embrace this method of listening and engaging the customers. One caution I would send out to anyone setting up a larger scale idea site is the need for a management back end. You can only imagine trying to sort through and actually work on the almost 9K ideas we have so far without a method for tracking status, assigning owners, etc. Do you know if these other vendors offer the idea management tools as well?
Dawn Lacallade, Dell Ideastorm

Posted by DellDawn on May 2nd, 2008 at 12:44 pm

Thanks DellDawn

To date, IdeaExchange is the only enterprise class version, although expect others to appear.

Posted by jeremiah_owyang on May 2nd, 2008 at 12:52 pm

Whoops! I guess you missed Brightidea.com in your in depth analysis for this piece. =)

Salesforce.com is the ‘only enterprise class’ option? really??

It might surprise you to learn that these minor enterprises use our tools:
- UBS
- Cisco
- Bayer
- British Telecom
- Discovery Channel
- and about 200+ others.

Our SaaS infrastructure is SAS70 certified and has been used to collect ideas from over 100 countries. Enterprises
with more than 25 geographic locations and over 125,000 employees have also been successful with our tools.

Cisco’s I-Prize is powered by our WebStorm product
http://www.cisco.com/iprize/

But collecting ideas from customers without the means or a process to follow-through is like asking your family what they want for dinner, ignoring them, and serving meatloaf left-overs.

That’s why Brightidea.com offers not only the Idea Portal, but also the back-end with full-scale Idea Management, and Innovation Pipeline tracking system, to close the loop.

Don’t take my word for it. Dawn@Dell is on the front lines, she gets what is required to be successful.

Ideas isn’t a ‘feature’ of Brightidea’s whitelabel social network it is the sole purpose. I predict: unless white label social networks specialize to a specific core business process, they will end up in the IT trash heap, covered in the ashes of their VCs money. Hey is that Knowledge Management over there? It’s good to see you again man!

When we show people how our customers have saved tens of millions dollars or grown revenue hundreds of millions dollars with our tools, they don’t have to blush when they bring it to management.

Respectfully Yours,

Matt Greeley
President & CEO
Brightidea.com :: The Leader in On-Demand Innovation Management
http://www.brightidea.com
http://www.brightidea.com/webstorm/

ps-Not every customer idea site /should/ be public, especially when dealing with intellectual property or new business ideas. Once something gets cached by Google you can’t make it go away even if you want to. Frankly, I’m worried some of these newer vendors are giving Innovation Management a bad name.

Posted by Matt Greeley on May 2nd, 2008 at 5:43 pm

The “suggestion box” approach can provide some value, and I’m now trying out UserVoice and IdeaScale as well. Interesting timing in the blogosphere on this one!

A completely open suggestion box, can however have some major downsides - even though I’m a believer in participation, openness and transparency, the stats on innovation show that focus is needed to maximize the value of these efforts.

As @DellDawn suggests, the whole management process itself is significant. Creating the front-end, vote up/down, commentary and status isn’t rocket science. Nearly any blog can do that right now with a few widgets to provide ranking, combined with typical commenting and categories/tagging.

Innovation Management and Idea Management imply and end-to-end process, including the idea generation component on through filtering for duplicates, dumb ideas, things that have already been done, as well as genuine useful and relevant ideas that can be taken to market.

And I have to say, Salesforce.com is not nearly the first or the most successful “open innovation” solution.

This entire movement is born out of the Voice of the Customer movement, itself coming from marketing techniques that go back to the earliest days of focus groups. It’s just at a different scale - small i innovation (incremental) rather than radical BIG I INNOVATION (brand new, never been seen before).

Some other competitors that have moved beyond the web-enabled open suggestion box: BrightIdea, Imaginatik, and MindMatters. All of which existed well before Salesforce commercialized their solution.

So, I’d say it is patently false to say that “IdeaExchange is the only enterprise class version” of anything. It’s a logical extension of the Salesforce platform - pulling data in from the outside (consumers, users), and marrying to their traditional datasource, handled by marketing and sales people and processes feeding in the CRM/SFA engines. Not “the only” by a long shot.

For someone else’s thoughts on the open innovation, wisdom of crowds front, see Mark Turrell’s recent YouTube video at http://youtube.com/watch?v=QVZLrcOJR6Y which describes more of the pros/cons of various approaches. He’s CEO of Imaginatik, so hardly unbiased, but he’s been involved in this type of work for nearly 10 years, and can provide far more detailed anecdotes on the hard results of these systems.

The Forbes article on Suggestion Box 2.0 is a reasonable introduction to this topic as well, see http://is.gd/by6 (far too long to paste here).

I’ll close with the wisdom that venture capitalists know all too well. Ideas are nothing. It’s execution that counts. How do you execute on 100, 1,000 or 10,000 submitted ideas? You can’t wing it, you need processes and systems in place, or you are toast.

Innovation at the enterprise-level is hard work, even when tapping the crowd. And as Henry Ford said “If I listened to my customers, I would’ve bred a faster horse.” Suggestions frequently (but not always) require interpretation.

Posted by Dan Keldsen on May 2nd, 2008 at 7:13 pm

Innovation - There’s More to it than Crowds…

Having spent 2 years diving into innovation and idea management, I know there is more to innovation than getting together in a room once a year and breaking out the post-it notes. There’s also more to innovation than simply asking…

Posted by BizTechTalk on May 2nd, 2008 at 8:16 pm

Matt

SalesForce has briefed several analysts at Forrester, have you briefed us yet? UserVoice has approached me as well.

Please do so, the process is here:

http://www.forrester.com/Briefing/Process

I look forward to updating this post.

Posted by jeremiah_owyang on May 2nd, 2008 at 10:02 pm

I believe that http://www.fevote.com is also offering similar services, suggestions, votes, comments, widgets etc

Posted by Panos Kontopoulos on May 3rd, 2008 at 10:57 am

J, I’m the newly hired mkt mgr at V:social, a white label social media promotions platform. We enable voting, ranking, rating etc. in addition to the usual. Is it true that no other white labels do the same?

Posted by Steven Shaffer on May 3rd, 2008 at 4:40 pm

Steven

Nice to meet you, you should setup a time to brief me formally, I’m going to be doing a a wave on your market soon.

There are many other white label providers doing this, they just have to configure certain modules.

Most have not ‘packaged’ it.

Posted by jeremiah_owyang on May 4th, 2008 at 6:05 am

[...] was commenting on Forrester Research Sr analyst Jememiah Owyang’s personal blog post, in which he boosts UserVoice who, to quote UserVoice’s website, “add structure to [...]

Posted by Collusion or collaboration? | Oliver Marks on May 4th, 2008 at 11:04 pm

[...] Build your own “IdeaStorm” with UserVoice [...]

Posted by FreshNetworks Blog » Blog Archive » If you don’t engage, they won’t respond on May 5th, 2008 at 7:37 am

You might want to read http://theartofinnovation.com/, visit IDEO, and Stanford’s dschool.

Posted by Steve Wilhelm on May 6th, 2008 at 11:31 pm

[...] στο γραφείο έπεσα πάνω σ’ ένα post του Jeremiah για μια νέα υπηρεσία τύπου Digg, που δίνει την ευκαιρία [...]

Posted by It works ! | mentalblock on May 7th, 2008 at 4:34 am

Posted by FreshNetworks Blog » Blog Archive » Communities for customer service - the case of SNCF on May 7th, 2008 at 1:24 pm

Thanks for the writeup…agreed that this will be a major “must have” feature for the army of white-listed social network providers.

I’ve spent a little time with both Uservoice and IdeaScale. It seems like if you took Uservoice’s UI and IdeaScale’s categorization and members-only login features, you’d have a win. Uservoice is far more intuitive than IdeaScale. To Matt Greely’s point, however, the fact that anyone can visit the site and leave comments because there is no login mechanism would clearly nix this idea for small businesses.

IdeaScale has more features and the categories that an admin can set up in advance can help channel your customers’ feedback, which is very helpful. They’ve also got several tiers of security (enabling you to have as much control over approving ideas or letting them go unmoderated). IdeaScale is currently in Beta, with corporate and enterprise-class licensed version planned some time in June.

While they were very responsive to some initial queries, it seems they’ve still got a few bugs to work out before this is really ready for prime-time.

Thanks again for the post; I’m looking forward to checking out what BrightIdea is offering in this space above and beyond the more publicly-celebrated examples like Dell and Starbucks.

Best regards,

Seth

Posted by Seth Brady on May 8th, 2008 at 12:38 pm

@Jeremiah,

We have briefed Charlene, Navi and most recently Chris Townsend. We’ll try to get on your calendar for a briefing asap.

Looking forward to the WAVE report.

Thanks for your thoughtful work on white label social networks. It has been formative to my own view of how Enterprise 2.0 is emerging.

I believe Forrester has a real advantage in expertise in Web 2.0, Ent 2.0, Corporate Social Networks & Innovation Management.

Posted by Matt Greeley on May 8th, 2008 at 4:53 pm

Jeremiah, I don’t know why you are plugging Salesforce so strongly. They are very new to this space, BrightIdea has been at it for years and has been winning some big accounts lately. I wrote about them on ZDNet last year…

Posted by Tom Foremski on May 8th, 2008 at 11:06 pm

Another great solution exists : FeedBack 2.0 (http://www.feedback20.com) which allow brands to create their own feedback platform.

Posted by Cédric DENIAUD on May 9th, 2008 at 2:26 am

Tom

We’ve been praising Dell’s Ideastorm here at Forrester, and the halo effect has shifted to the vendor that provided the service.

Many other brands also covet Dell’s success and discussions over their platform (SalesForce) has come up.

Secondly, Brightidea hasn’t briefed me (maybe other analysis) so I hope to learn more.

Eyes and ears open.

Posted by jeremiah_owyang on May 9th, 2008 at 3:41 am

[...] add social computing, where we companies are using blogs to market their companies, or SalesForce’s Ideas or Uservoice to let customers define how engineering will focus, things start to mix up, the lines blur. In the [...]

Posted by Is your Company Market driven or Product Driven? on May 26th, 2008 at 7:31 am

[...] outside the firewall. (thanks to Arjun for the tip) UserVoice: Innovate with your marketplace I covered this company a few weeks ago when they launched, essentially a public version of SalesForce’s [...]

Posted by Dangers and Opportunities of the Crowdsourced Company on June 11th, 2008 at 4:40 am

UserVoice + GetSatisfaction would be really nice.

I’ve only played with UserVoice a little and they have indeed created a nice simple application which integrates ultra smooth.

I’d keep an eye out for getSatisfaction to implement some of this that they are currently lacking.

Posted by sigepjedi on July 25th, 2008 at 3:22 pm

I agree Josh (sigejedi) UV and GS are a good match. I’ll tell them that!

Posted by jeremiah_owyang on July 25th, 2008 at 4:16 pm

Posted by uservoice and getsatisfaction take friction out of the web 2.0 startup product and service management « Tomim. Strategy, Marketing & Media Tech on October 1st, 2008 at 5:40 am

[ROUNDTABLE-284] Introduction to UserVoice…

Hello!
My name is Emily and I am part of a service called UserVoice which creates
free feedback forums for open source projects and start-ups. UserVoice will
empower you to engage with clients in an open and transparent dialogue.

UserVoice …

Posted by JIRA: Roundtable on October 14th, 2008 at 9:40 am

[ROUNDTABLE-337] Introduction to UserVoice…

Posted by JIRA: Roundtable on October 14th, 2008 at 9:41 am

[...] Glowing reviews from Read Write Web, TechCrunch and Jeremiah Owyang. [...]

Posted by UserVoice - A Startup With Explosive Growth | Andrew Hyde - Humble Yet Bold on December 10th, 2008 at 4:29 am

Hi Jeremiah,

Thank you for your write-up on UserVoice. We are working with the University of California San Diego (UCSD) to create a tighter alumni network. (http://ucsd.alumnidea.com/) We are using UserVoice as a community platform for alumni to submit and vote on ideas.

Before we built the site, we looked at a number of different community platform services including Sales Force. We ultimately chose UserVoice for a number of different reasons.

The number of options that Sales Force offered just became too overwhelming. Although some companies may be looking for a CRM solution with many options, we needed something straight forward and easy to set up. All the options they offered actually became a barrier. If we wanted a certain option, we were routed around to too many different people and promised too many calls back. We almost like to think of Sales Force as a PC and UserVoice as a Mac.

UserVoice also conveniently allows alumni to sign in using different log-ins including Facebook, Myspace, Yahoo, Google and AOL. We really like this option as most people do not want to sign up for yet another account! Lastly, UserVoice was more affordable and fit our budget perfectly.

So far, UserVoice has been very helpful to us by answering our questions and we really appreciate that.

Other companies could probably learn a little something from UserVoice–offer a platform
where people can sign up, customize and use.
Not everyone needs bells and whistles.

-Violet

Posted by violet on February 5th, 2009 at 2:57 pm

Can uservoice be used within an Enterprise for employee suggestions?

Posted by Ian on March 26th, 2009 at 7:43 am

Hi Ian -
As a matter of fact, yes - many companies use UserVoice for internal innovation.

Please see our FAQ for more detail: http://uservoice.com/faq

Posted by Marcus Nelson on March 26th, 2009 at 12:03 pm

Hi Marcus

How much does uservoice cost for internal innovation? and where will it be hosted? could it be internally hosted by the company?

Posted by Ian on March 30th, 2009 at 1:59 am

Hey Ian -
Our internal innovation package is the Silver plan ($289 at the time of this writing) which include Single Sign On, SSL encryption and APIs for exporting data. See here: http://uservoice.com/pricing

As for hosting UserVoice yourself, please refer to the first section of our FAQ: http://uservoice.com/faq

Posted by Marcus Nelson on March 30th, 2009 at 7:36 am

For an open source alternative, consider IdeaTorrent:
http://www.ideatorrent.org/