Imagine this: Dell launches a crowdsourcing initiative and wins a PR Innovation of the Year 2008 award and when Starbucks uses the EXACT SAME software from Salesforce.com, people start dumping on them.

Only on the web.

It seems that many bloggers and mainstream media love to hate Starbucks right now. Social Media Insider on Mediapost carried a post titled “Ewww….What’s That Smell? It’s MyStarbucksIdea.com” and judging by the comments, the readers have a better understanding of the goal of the site than the writer (I like Mediapost and this new blog by the way, just disappointed with this post).

At least the recent post on News.com, Has crowdsourcing jumped the shark?, clearly identifies that the new site is all about allowing people to make suggestions to Starbucks and vote on other suggestions. Too bad that last week they called it a social networking site and tried to belittle it: “You know social networking has jumped the shark when Starbucks gets into the act.”

Others are mistakenly classifying this as a social network play by Starbucks as well but the slightest bit of research, like clicking on the very clear “powered by Salesforce.com” logo would reveal quite clearly that this is not meant to be a social network. The link takes you to this page: http://www.salesforce.com/products/ideas/ which clearly explains the purpose of the “online community application”:

Salesforce Ideas makes it easy to unleash the power of your community. By creating an interactive Ideas forum where people can vet their best ideas, you can become a more responsive company, uncovering new opportunities and instilling a sense of co-ownership with your most passionate evangelists.

I certainly didn’t see the same reaction when Dell launched Ideastorm, which won PR Innovation of the Year 2008 in the PRWeek Awards. The Starbucks site even seems to be hosted on Salesforce’s servers since the actual url ends up being mystarbucksidea.force.com/home/home.jsp.

If you are going to judge something, judge it for what it is, not what you THINK it is. Starbucks is smart to engage consumers at this time because suggestion boxes in stores is old school. It is far better and more useful to have thousands of people vote on the suggestions that have been made because it makes it easier to gauge the importance of a suggestion.

While I don’t believe that the customer is always right, you still want to hear everything they are saying and this application from Salesforce is exactly what many companies should be making use of to gather feedback from consumers so that they can improve their services and/or products.

Clearly Starbucks has a bigger image problem than just customer perception if bloggers and mainstream media are so quick to be negative.

Filed under: Branding, Industry News, Marketing Trends