There’s no doubt that social media is the way for businesses of all sizes to directly communicate with consumers. Going beyond this interaction, social media does provides direct feedback to businesses about their products, pricing, distribution, etc. Obviously, crowdsourcing, or social innovation, can be a powerful tool, however if you’re in the SMB category, collecting focused, valuable feedback from users, managing this data, and then deriving practical action points from it can be a bit more of a time investment than many have to make.
If you’re the person (or part of a team) that’s responsible for your organization’s social media outreach, chances are, you’ve already got a mountain of data sitting in your Facebook or Twitter stream. You’re monitoring what’s being said about your organization with a variety of tools. Instead of focusing on your output, let’s turn the tables and see what the output from your following community is. This is the very first step in crowdsourcing your company’s next move: Listen.
Thanks to the advent and popularity of social media, organizations are able to gather feedback and innovate faster than any time previously in history. Chances are, your organization already has a social media presence, and is already interacting with consumers on a daily basis. By simply adding the “innovation” facet to that interaction, organizations that shape the direction of their offerings based in part through social media user feedback are far more likely to deliver offerings that truly resonate with consumers than those that don’t. Which side would you rather be on?
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