As already mentioned in my post yesterday, there are numerous open innovation initiatives and crowdsourcing communities out there. The request for attention is growing rapidly as every company is trying to use users and consumers for their product development.
Hence, in our current attention economy it gets increasingly difficult to actively integrate users and consumers into the companies' innovation process.
But why go for the difficult way, when there is a way easier option already available: Social Media Measurement.
SMM makes product buzz visibly and measurable
Social Media Measurement (SMM) software automatically crawls the web (mostly the social web) for you and builds up a database around your search terms. Usually you can limit your search to specific countries, languages or also target groups e.g. demographics or content category (bloggers ...).
So, the website crawling is the basis for all of the following: This is where the magic happens because the software is using advanced text mining techniques for performing content and sentiment analysis. From a companies' perspective is it very helpful to already have all the content categorized as all continuative activities can focus directly on certain brands, products, or product features.
At the moment the SMM industry is strongly expanding. There are already several software applications with very good usability available, for instance Techrigy's SM2 or Scoutlabs (to mention only the two best applications in my personal opinion).
Usable for Open Innovation?
The big advantage of SMM is the availability and quickness of the data retrieval. You don't need to setup your own community or wait until a critical mass of collaborators joined your community.
This approach doesn't even require large resources. For a company like Procter & Gamble i would assume that 2-5 FTE's are already enough to keep up with the latest product buzz. In case of smaller companies maybe even 2-3 hours per week would do it. The cost for the software is often below 500 USD per month, which makes it also interesting for SMEs.
But on the other hand, it is usually not possible to come up with one single problem which should be solved. Instead you just have to take what you find. This approach could potentially generate usable results for the marketing deparment (e.g. customer needs) but will also provide insights on incremental product innovations and improvements (e.g. product tweaks, solving product bugs).
Conclusion
You don't always need to actively engage with your customers. Sometimes it is enough to just listen to them. Therefore I think that SMM is one form of doing open innovation passively.
SMM is already a key technology for the so-called Web 3.0, the semantic web and can be used in very different ways. For instance, for Customer Relationship Management as well as for Product Improvement and Innovation Management. Consequently I would strongly recommend to use it.
It would be just silly to not listen to your customers.
