Use Online Communities to Find Breakthrough Ideas

Creating an Engaged and Invested Community
Web sites acting as online suggestion boxes where members submit and read ideas and then go on their way are not true communities. True communities bring members together, offer them a rich and varied experience and nurture ongoing participation. True communities derive power from their members’ continued willingness to share opinions and work together over time.

Unfortunately, while community engagement and collective decision-making are what help bring winning ideas to life, they rarely happen organically. To keep members coming back, the community experience must stimulate creativity, provide avenues to explore concepts and thoughts, and promote authentic interaction and exchange.

Ways to encourage community engagement:

• Stimulate creativity through topics, polls, chatsand forums. Introduce members to topics and themes via message boards, chat rooms or blogs. Change the topic fre­quently to keep people coming back. Give users forums to discuss with their peers topics of their own choosing.
• Recognize contributions through reputation systems. Award points and assign reputation levels to members based on the quality of their participation as recognized by their community peers. These systems help members feel incented to participate and gain recognition from the community.
• Enable collaboration through subscriptions. Make it possible for people to follow the progress of their ideas (or those of others) via e-mail notifications and threaded discussions. This enables members to form virtual workgroups around an idea, so all interested parties track and collaborate around a concept as it evolves.
• Create connections with member-to-member messaging. Enable members to send one another private messages through the community site. Nothing motivates return visits more than an inbox filled with messages from new friends.

Putting the Pieces Together
A great example of how one company put all the pieces together is Del Monte’s Meow Mix Brand Group. To ensure a robust pipeline of new product ideas, the company sought an influx of out-of-the-box ideas for innovative new products. Instead of relying solely on consultants and small internal teams, the company invited 650 cat owners to join an online community—nicknamed the “Meow Mixer” group––to collectively participate in the ideation process.

The fully managed and moderated site is a place where consumers come to contribute ideas, directly respond to moderator-presented themes (such as “eco-friendly foods” or “on-the-go snacks”), and evaluate, rate and refine ideas. The hottest ideas bubble to the top, are turned into concepts and then tested with quantitative survey research, a process that makes ideas better and more feasible for the company to bring to market.

In just eight weeks, the Meow Mixer community generated more than 300 ideas, 15 of which were turned into “champion” concepts for testing. Eleven ideas passed standard screening criteria for purchase intent. Results so far indicate that ideas from the community are passing concept screens at a highly successful rate and are surpassing ideas from other sources in terms of uniqueness. Going forward, this process will enable the brand and research departments to more quickly identify ideas with true potential for success and potentially save resources as these ideas move through the product development process.

Turning Ideas into Action
Even the most engaged and invested community can get off-track. With so many activities to participate in and so many ideas to review, community members can lose focus. In addition, community members are typically left to build out ideas on their own through short comments about what they like or don’t like, but these comments rarely provide insight about why an idea is or isn’t appealing to the group After all, it’s one thing to give your opinion, it’s quite another to work collaboratively to transform ideas into a complete and defined solution that can be taken to market.

A more useful and successful approach is one with a clear director and process for the development of ideas––call it guided idea development. With this approach, a moderator helps identify the best ideas based on community comments and ratings and then guides members’ to consider specific, critically important aspects of a solution in order to tweak it and make it better. For example, the moderator may ask the community where they would expect to purchase a proposed product, what they would be willing to pay for it or what similar products they have seen in the marketplace. This means that all members of the community––from outside customers and consumers to internal R&D to sales and marketing––have a chance to weigh in, provide feedback, share potential concerns and help move the best ideas to the next phase.

Emily Morris is director of product marketing, online communities, for MarketTools.