Just when you thought Digg cloning was dead, Salesforce has thrown its hat into the ring. The company best known for their SaaS CRM is unleashing their Digg-for-ideas, “Salesforce Ideas”, into the wild. Although announced back in October, they are now releasing the product publicly. Now any enterprise can order their own clone of Salesforce’s IdeaExchange, which lets customers post ideas on how the company can improve their product. It’s targeted at, and works best for, existing Salesforce customers with a specific community of customers. Unlike the free opensource Pligg, this software may cost you. It’s being release for free to professional, enterprise, and unlimited customers. But anyone off the Salesforce platform using the service has to buy a license, which can cost anywhere from $50-$100 per user per month. I’d recommend (free) Satisfaction’s help and idea board for businesses with larger audiences. Salesforce is pushing the platform integration because unlike Pligg, Ideas’ will know who your customers are. The system will integrate with your CRM account to let only those users in. The concept is pretty straight forward and a bit more exciting than a straight idea forum. Yahoo has even launched a similar product for their own use. On Salesforce Ideas Users can post product ideas to a moderated board, which everyone can promote or demote up and down the board. The most popular ideas, based on the frequency of promotions over a period of time, make it to the top of the board. Attached to each idea is a discussion thread, where members can leave comments building on the idea. Salesforce claims to have used ideas on the board to improve their product, and even drive ideas for some AppExchange startups (AppExtremes, Appirio). After a year, their board has about 13,000 users, 5,000 ideas, and drives 100K pageviews per month. Dell runs an instance of the board on Dell Idea Storm, which it credits with the idea to pre-install the Ubuntu Linux operating system on select consumer desktops and notebooks in the U.S, UK, France and Germany. CrunchBase Information Digg Satisfaction Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Customers are a hidden source of product specialists that corporations have been slow to tap. They usually become very knowledgeable about products they love and can often solve problems an understaffed support department doesn’t have the resources or will to solve (e.g. how to unlock an iPhone). It’s no wonder crowdsourcing your customers has become a popular and lucrative business – just see our recent coverage of PowerReviews and Bazaarvoice). Satisfaction Unlimited is another one of the companies tapping this knowledge base by helping young companies crowdsource their support amongst their customers. They’re doing it through a network of corporate discussion boards that let customers ask questions, propose ideas, submit problems, or just chat. Satisfaction is currently powering online support for a couple notable properties (Twitter, Pownce, Slideshare) and is now opening up a public beta to even more companies. They’ve also just raised a $1.3 million round from First Round Capital, O’Reilly Alphatech Ventures, Jeff Clavier, Adaptive Path, Mike Brown, and Jason Schultz. Satisfaction’s network consists of AJAXy bulletin boards for over 200 companies. Not all of them are “owned” by the companies they represent, but rather spots for consumers to meet each other and mull over their latest issues. The open beta will let companies come in and claim these boards so they can moderate the forum and connect with their customers. Having a network of these help boards provides an advantage to setting up your own board since the network comes with an existing user base. Tangler’s forums system also has this advantage. The boards themselves are very similar to Jive’s entry-level product, their enterprise knowledge base. Users can create profiles and make posts to the board. Corporate mods can surf the board to moderate and answer questions. You can also search for and follow different conversation threads by email and RSS as they unfold. While Jive offers a significant number of extra upgrades to their system, Satisfaction fits the bill for smaller businesses. → Read More
