1) The document discusses best practices for companies to engage customers in ideation through social media channels to increase competitive advantage. It outlines strategies for setting goals, evaluating ideas, communicating with customers, enlisting staff, and maintaining a positive environment to encourage participation. 2) Successful ideation can reduce business costs, improve customer loyalty and satisfaction by demonstrating the company listens, and drive sales by offering products customers indicate interest in. 3) Maintaining responsiveness to customers' ideas, recognizing contributions, and implementing suggestions are keys to an effective ideation process.

1. Best Practice Ideation
Co-creating with Social
Customers for Increased
Competitive Advantage

2. Best Practice Ideation
Co-creating with Social Customers for
Increased Competitive Advantage
1
Introduction
Customers enjoy providing feedback—especially when they feel someone is listening.
If you ask them, your customers will tell you what they think of your current products,
which product enhancements and new features they want, which new services they’re
most likely to use, which topics they’re interested in hearing about—even what you
should call your next product.
With advances in technology and the strong cultural shift toward online social activity,
engaging customers for feedback and input has never been easier, less expensive, or
more effective. The social web makes it easy to ideate with social customers wherever
they are—in customer communities, on Facebook, and on Twitter. Whether through a
formal idea exchange or a structured plan to capture customers’ ideas across social
channels, turning to social customers for input and feedback accelerates innovation,
mitigates risk, and increases competitive advantage.
Ideation is the capture of customer feedback and input in a systematic
way, identifying the most important ideas, and providing feedback and
encouragement to keep the ideas flowing.
Forrester Research, Inc. Analyst, Doug Williams, points out in his January 28, 2011
Forrester blog posting, Why You Should Use Co-Creation To Build A Better Product
In 2011, that “a majority of companies are not yet using social technologies to involve
consumers in the product development process, but that will soon change.” Forrester
expects an increasing number of companies to begin experimenting with social
customer ideation in 2011—“or risk being left behind while their competitors move
forward.”
Indeed, Lithium has found that a number of our customers are dabbling in ideation—
even though their customer communities were not intended for such. In a recent Social
Customer survey, we found that although customer feedback and ideation were an
intended benefit for 46% of communities, it was realized by 78% of communities.
Ideation emerges as a natural “downstream” benefit of customer communities. Brands
are more likely to harvest and consider ideas from customers they trust—who engage in
a sustained dialog with them. Customers are more likely to trust ideas from peers who
have proven themselves reliably knowledgeable over time.

3. Best Practice Ideation
Co-creating with Social Customers for
Increased Competitive Advantage
2
The Business Case for Ideation
The business case for ideating with social customers rests on the same principles as
other online initiatives: reduced costs, increased customer loyalty, improved customer
satisfaction, and increased sales.
ƒƒ Reducing costs. Ideating with social customers can significantly reduce the cost
for companies to acquire product feedback, particularly from targeted groups of
customers. Social customer ideation can help companies to validate plans, obtain
cost effective fact-based market research faster than with traditional focus groups,
and reduce the risks inherent in new product development.
ƒƒ Increasing customer loyalty and improving customer satisfaction. Customers hold
a more positive opinion of a company when they think the company is listening to
them. Even more important to customer loyalty and satisfaction is the perception
that the company is acting on customer feedback. Two notable examples of
implemented ideas, Dell’s new Linux systems and Starbucks’ introduction of lid
stoppers to prevent spills, have helped both companies to improve
customer sentiment.
ƒƒ Driving sales. The real-time, inarguable data that comes from social customer
ideation enables companies to offer products and services their customers have
already indicated they will buy. This kind of customer-centric innovation is an
important competitive advantage as innovation cycles continue to accelerate.
Ideation Best Practices
If this is your first foray into social customer ideation, best practice is to start with a
narrow focus, adding additional instances and broadening the focus over time.
Best practices for social customer ideation and successful online communities
have substantial overlap. Both benefit from thorough pre-launch planning and
careful execution.

4. Best Practice Ideation
Co-creating with Social Customers for
Increased Competitive Advantage
3
1. Set a goal and define the ideation focus to meet that goal.
Although most companies focus ideation on product feedback and suggestions, there
are many ways to utilize customer-generated ideas, including:
ƒƒ Comprehensive listening: Not all ideas need be formally solicited. Many ideas
happen as a byproduct of other things. With social media monitoring, customer
input can be culled from across social media—Facebook, Twitter, blogs, and
forums—identified as ideas, and added to the ideation process.
ƒƒ Contests or events: Typically used to build traffic to a community or energize
customers around a specific event, contests and events are an easy-to-implement
way to begin ideating with social customers. Examples include providing a showcase
for user-submitted photos and soliciting suggestions from customers for future
blog posts or discussion topics at an upcoming conference.
ƒƒ Social polls: Short in duration and with narrow focus, social polls take the pulse
of your customers—through their comments and votes—on specific ideas that
you propose. You can prime the pump with a set of ideas that the company wants
feedback on.
ƒƒ Superuser focus groups: Based on a combination of reputation and activity, you
can identify the most valuable and prolific ideas contributors. By inviting them to
participate in private ideation, you create a low-cost, ad hoc focus group that can
yield a large amount of meaningful feedback quickly.
ƒƒ Community feedback: This type of ideation collects feedback from community
members on the features and function of the community itself. Because the
subject of these ideas is limited to the community itself, taking action on the most
popular ones is easy and carries very little risk. The rewards, however, are high as
community members see the company demonstrating its willingness to listen and
respond to their feedback.
2. Define an internal process for evaluating ideas and deciding which ones merit
further research.
Companies that already handle input from employees or focus groups can simply adapt
or build on existing processes. For companies that are new to ideation, a simple review
and escalation process is typically enough to start with.

5. Best Practice Ideation
Co-creating with Social Customers for
Increased Competitive Advantage
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Unlike focus groups that might be pulled together quickly and have a short life span,
ideation is an ongoing proposition. As such, it requires ongoing involvement and
encouragement from the company. With potential contributors waiting on the sidelines
to see how serious the company is about listening, company responsiveness has a
significant impact on the overall productivity of the ideation process.
3. Define a comprehensive plan for communicating with customers about ideas.
Although ideation is primarily about listening, an effective and comprehensive plan for
communicating back to your customers is critical to ideation success. Companies who
ideate sucessfully:
ƒƒ Lay the groundwork to attract potential contributors through direct invitations to
customers, links on the corporate website, display of ideas content on other web
pages, and other similar activities.
ƒƒ Set expectations and limits clearly and accurately, letting users know how quickly
you will respond to new ideas and how often you will update users about ideas that
you plan to act on. Experience tells us that accurate communication on these points
is essential.
ƒƒ Explain the ground rules so that users know not only what to contribute, but also
what not to contribute, what their votes mean, and how to comment on ideas.
ƒƒ Plan for ongoing participation by the company to communicate on the status of
ideas and any plans for implementation. If contributors don’t perceive that the
company is listening, the flow of ideas will stop, and participation will dwindle.
Regular blog posts are a good way to provide progress updates or to discuss ideas
that are under consideration.
ƒƒ Publish your successes and be generous with credit for good ideas—this rewards
contributors and encourages more participation.
4. Make ideation part of an overall social media strategy.
Whether you are integrating ideation into an existing community or are using it as
a way to start the online conversation with your customers, it should be part of a
comprehensive social media plan.

6. Best Practice Ideation
Co-creating with Social Customers for
Increased Competitive Advantage
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As the graph below indicates, ideating with social customers typically experiences rapid
adoption as a result of pent-up user demand (a well-known computer manufacturer
reported more than 2,000 ideas posted during the first week.) After the initial
outpouring of ideas from your customers, it’s wise to have a plan in place to capitalize
on user engagement by adding other social media applications such as forums or blogs,
or by adding new services to engage the community that arise around your
idea exchange.
5. Enlist the right people.
Having the right people engaged in an innovation project provides essential leadership,
management, and communication functions. Key participants include: 1.) A business
owner who provides management support, sets the direction for the project, oversees
the budget, and re-evaluates its mission and direction regularly to ensure that they
remain relevant, 2.) An initiative manager who handles planning and day-to-day
decision-making. 3.) One or more moderators who provide feedback, enforce rules, and
help users, and 4.) Designated communicators from different parts of the company who
are genuinely enthusiastic about ideation.
Tip: When evaluating ideas solutions, look for software that empowers the initiative
manager with a wide range of administration and configuration options—both for
daily operations and to manage growth.
Tip: Companies who ideate successfully have found that rank-and-file employees
can make good moderators. You may also want to consider including them in the
process for evaluating the ideas submitted.
Ideas
Time
Posts
During the initial rollout of an idea
exchange, you can expect to see a
steep and rapid adoption.
By this point, you can identify the most
valuable and prolific contributors.
Before participation levels off or
starts to decline is the ideal time to
introduce additional social media
applications, such as blogs or forums,
or offer new services to capitalize on
the activity and interest your idea
exchange has generated.
1
2
3 1
2
3

7. Best Practice Ideation
Co-creating with Social Customers for
Increased Competitive Advantage
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6. Define roles for staff and users and configure the software appropriately.
Key questions to ask when launching an ideas solution are:
1. Who are the users of this idea exchange?
2. What special rights or permissions are they likely to need to be
truly productive?
3. What rights and permissions will the employees who interact with the idea
exchange need?
Tip: Look for an ideas solution with specific permissions that can be assigned at the
community, group, or individual level.
7. Create a structure to engage users.
Ideating with social customers means giving them the opportunity to submit ideas,
discuss them, and vote on those they like the best. The goal is to encourage your
customers, even first-time visitors, to find and vote for ideas. The most successful
ideation structures are accessible, easy to navigate, and allow visitors to readily discover
the newest and the most popular ideas. A simple structure lowers the barriers to
participation, encouraging early visitors to find a point of connection. As participation
grows, you can offer your most active customers additional ways in which to
provide feedback.
Tip: Make sure that when usage scales, your ideation process supports the roll-out
of additional features.
8. Accentuate the positive.
Maintaining a positive atmosphere is also key to productive ideation. Explicit guidelines
and clearly stated expectations about how participants will behave are an important first
step. Equally important is ongoing monitoring and moderation to maintain a productive
and engaging atmosphere.
Tip: Although listening is the main function of ideation, make sure that your ideas
solution includes tools for moderators to actively maintain a welcoming and
inclusive atmosphere, as well as features that facilitate ongoing feedback from the
company to participants’ ideas.

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Co-creating with Social Customers for
Increased Competitive Advantage
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9. Cultivate and use your superusers wisely.
This is the golden rule for online communities and is equally true for ideation.
Superusers are unpaid product experts and evangelists. They are knowledgeable about
your products, active contributors to your forums, and are most likely to contribute
the best ideas for new products and enhancements. They are motivated by twin
desires to help other customers use your products and help you build better ones.
The key to finding your superusers is a comprehensive set of metrics that identifies
typical superuser behavior patterns and a system of public and private rewards that
encourages these patterns.
Tip: To utilize superusers effectively, you need a robust reputation system that
acknowledges and rewards them—both publicly and privately—as their
contributions increase.

9. Best Practice Ideation
Co-creating with Social Customers for
Increased Competitive Advantage
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Lithium
lithium.com | 6121 Hollis Street, Suite 4, Emeryville, CA 94608 | tel 510.653.6800 | fax 510.653.6801
© 2011 Lithium Technologies, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Conclusion
Ideation is a powerful and cost-effective way for companies to co-create with their
social customers, and its success depends on the flow of information between both
participants—the brand and the customer. What matters most is the quality of ideas
posted, the degree to which participation is encouraged, and the number of ideas
actually implemented.
By giving participants opportunities to share their ideas and opinions directly with
the company, ideation with social customers helps to attract more customers and
build brand loyalty. Likewise, they provide companies with timely insight into the
requirements of an ever-changing marketplace..
About Lithium
Lithium helps top brands find online and mobile social customers, understand their
influence, and build lasting relationships. The Lithium Social Customer Suite offers
comprehensive social monitoring, creative customer experiences, and actionable
analytics across millions of blogs, forums, and social networking sites. Our technology
is proven in high-volume, growth environments and provides security, open and
custom APIs, and multi-language support. For market leaders such as Best Buy, AT&T,
Research In Motion Limited (RIM), Univision, and PayPal, Lithium is the leading provider
of social customer solutions that deliver real business results.