Baked In

Look around. Are your customers demanding more involvement in your brand and with your products? Are they talking about your products on blogs and other social media? The first step in your exploration of this opportunity is to get into the conversation. Start answering questions about your products on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media. Make comments on relevant blog posts. Likewise, ensure that your website is more interactive. Let people leave comments on it, and make sure they’re answered.

The key is the ability to engage, to be involved in dialogue. It’s a hard shift to make from inside-out to outside-in innovation—but most likely, it’s inevitable. Once you get the hang of participating in an open fl ow of conversation, millions of possibilities unfold. You can start getting feedback from the community you’ve engaged, in ways that might complement or even replace customer service or market research. Once you’ve built the dialogue, you’ve created the conduit through which ideas can really start to flow. People want to participate. But remember, the only way to keep ideas flowing is to keep the dialogue going.