Tag Archives: IdeaScale

Get Creative with Your Rewards

Posted on January 7, 2013 by | Leave a comment

ImageAs you know, this Wednesday is our complimentary webinar: The ROI on Rewards: When To Add Incentives to Your Campaign. 

We’ll be talking about how to gamify your approach to network intelligence communities and what sort of motivation can generate better ideas and participation. But over the past few weeks, we’ve been thinking a lot about how varied different incentives can be.

One of our favorite rewards is obviously the President’s SAVE Award. After federal employees have submitted their ideas and the public has voted on those ideas and after the OMB has narrowed down the finalist to the top idea, the winner gets to come to Washington to present their idea to the President. The real award is not just meeting the President, but also the honor of having made such a difference as well. Two ideas (by themselves) have already saved the government over $42 million.

Another example is Manor, Texas – a small town that has introduced “innobucks.” Citizens that submit ideas or review and comment on ideas, earn innobucks that can be exchanged for various rewards, like a ride-along with the Chief of Police or dinner with the city mayor.

And, of course, Kickstarter has helped pave the way for rewards that are both creative and help evangelize the product/project. A woman traveling around the world offers pictures of herself at various tourist points, a man creating his own short film offers an exclusive discount on the purchase of his DVD.

But, the real reward is often simply recognition or participating in the community. How do we honor those ideas? What sort of encouragement takes place in order to value innovation? This alone can often make a difference with 69% of employees saying that they would work harder if they were better recognized. This goes for sharing innovation, as well.

What sort of incentives do you offer? Want to know more about how to incentivize your innovation program? Join us by registering here for our webinar:

The ROI on Rewards: When To Add Incentives to Your Campaign
Wednesday, January 9th, 2013
9:30 a.m. – 10:00 a.m. PST

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The ROI on Rewards: When To Add Incentives to Your Campaign

Posted on December 18, 2012 by | Leave a comment

ImageJoin IdeaScale and Olivier Toubia in this complimentary webinar as we explore the behaviors that influence engagement when it comes to innovation and idea generation communities.

The questions the webinar will answer:

-How can I gamify the innovation experience?
-What sort of incentive programs work best for my goals?

Olivier Toubia’s article “Idea Generation, Creativity, and Incentives” was the winner of the John Little Best Paper Award. Toubia explores the behaviors that drive engagement, what sorts of incentives work best for different campaigns with different goals, and offers practical management advice for idea generation communities.

Join us:
Wednesday, January 9th, 2013
9:30 a.m. – 10:00 a.m. PS

For a look at some of Toubia’s research, visit here.
For more information about IdeaScale, please visit our site

Speaker:

Olivier Toubia, Glaubinger Professor of Business, Columbia Business School

Register here for this complimentary webinar.

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Burger Week

Posted on December 14, 2012 by | 1 Comment

ImageIdeaScale works globally and has a truly far-flung network of associates. We’ve become experts at telecommuting and long distance collaborating and it helps to serve our global network of clients as well. Someone’s always on.

However, every so often, our team gathers and we reach a critical mass. Amazing things happen in this time: we get some great ideas into production, we collaborate, overheard conversations become group brainstorming sessions. We become drunk on our own power and possibility and sometimes this veers into dangerous territory as it did this week.

With team members in from all over the U.S. and as far away as Bangladesh – all of us assembled in our Bay Area headquarters, exciting things happened. In addition to a lot of great progress on IdeaScale projects, we launched a week-long quest that we called Burger Week.

Each day this week, the whole team has gathered at lunch-time in search of another great burger. Every day this week was a new chance to have the art and science of burger assemblage re-envisioned for us. Crucial questions came into play: drive-in style or gourmet burgers? Pickles and mayo on every burger or were those considered burger perks? It got to the point where there was a strange emptiness that prevailed over us all right around noon? What was this feeling? This void? And then it dawned on us: it had been almost 24 hours since our last burger.

Since the start of burger week, we have visited: Stags Lunchnette, Smokehouse, True Burger, Phat Matt’s BBQ, and we’ll just have to see what Friday afternoon has in store. Yes, next week, we might all have to retreat to our separate corners of the world, but not without answering what our favorite East Bay burger was.

What are we going to do next time everyone’s in town? Pizza Week.

What happens when your team collaborates? What’s your favorite burger? Want to know what we think? Just email us and we’d be glad to give you a burger recommendation. It’s safe to say that we reference the Hamblogger as our fearless burger guide. Check it out for some great burger writing and recommendations.

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Research from our Complimentary Webinar: Beyond the Survey, The Future of Customer Collaboration

Posted on October 29, 2012 by | 1 Comment

While we look forward to the upcoming complimentary webinar tomorrow, we thought it might be fun to share some customer feedback statistics from our research:

79% of companies DO NOT define best practices for utilizing and deriving actionable insights from customer feedback.
Source: Aberdeen Group
http://www.business2community.com/loyalty-marketing/taking-action-on-customer-feedback-029819#UIdzWBZyQ1SqgxFJ.99

70% of customer experience management best-in-class adopters use customer feedback to make strategic decisions.
Source: Aberdeen Group
http://www.customer1.com/blog/customer-service-statistics

In 2010, even with evolving and proliferating technologies, the most common channels for customer feedback collection were:

  • Email/online surveys: 51%
  • Phone surveys: 28%
  • Informal customer phone calls: 21%

Source: MarketTools http://marketing.markettools.com/rs/markettools/images/MarketTools_EFM_MarketPlace_Report_data.pdf

Customer service is an even more firm bottom line for customers that leave companies: According to Accenture’s 4th Annual Study on Customer Service for the United States, 73% [of customers] report they left a service provider because of poor customer service, versus only 47% who left because of a lower price.
Source: Accenture
http://www.ehow.com/about_5082152_benefits-good-customer-service.html

People are talking about products and brands: looking at just Twitter alone, one Penn State study found that 20% of tweets were asking about or discussing products.
Source: Penn State study
http://blog.vovici.com/blog/bid/52632/The-Survey-is-Dead-Long-Live-the-Survey

Learn more about the future of customer feedback and collaboration at our complimentary webinar on October 30th at 9 a.m. PST. Register here.

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Beyond the Survey: The Future of Customer Collaboration

Posted on October 25, 2012 by | Leave a comment

Join SAP and IdeaScale in this complimentary webinar as we navigate the future of customer engagement.

The IdeaScale-powered SAP Business ByDesign Ideas Forum allows customers and partners to submit their ideas for improvement to the SAP product. Although SAP has always reached out to their customers throughout the development lifecycle, SAP found several unique opportunities offered by managing ideas and new innovation through their ideas forum.  Learn tips and tricks about building a global community, stewarding ideas, and impacting final product offerings in this webinar.

Tuesday, October 30th, 2012
9 a.m. – 9:30 a.m. PST

For more information about the Ideas Forum, read this article.

Speakers:

Rob Hoehn, co-founder and CEO, IdeaScale
Tatjana Walter, solution expert, SAP

Register here for this complimentary webinar that takes place next week.

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IdeaScale Introduces Admin Panel 2.0

Posted on June 16, 2012 by | 1 Comment

IdeaScale is constantly working to improve the offerings for our clients. We’re doing this at every level, looking to improve usability across all audiences. But we could never forget the fearless administrators who peer into projects, campaigns, and questions from every direction. They’re analyzing responses, assigning moderators, and observing the community.

Which is why IdeaScale is pleased to introduce our Admin Panel 2.0 – a better back end than ever before. Not only is it better looking and easier to use, it also includes new features like an idea list page size and a separate image library as well as others.

Now, if you’re like me, that means that sometimes when they update the blogspot dashboard or Facebook interface, that sometimes it throws off my online game for a couple of days, but the new IdeaScale admin panel is designed to be intuitive and accessible.

And it all starts tonight – the new features will be available this evening (US Time Zones). Be sure to check it out.

What do you think of the new administration panel? What sorts of new features are you most excited about?

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IdeaScale Facebook Page

Posted on May 15, 2012 by | Leave a comment

Facebook, the social networking monolith of our times is always updating their stats, but I recently ran across an interesting infographic from Infographic Labs that showcases some surprising highlights, including:

-That Zynga accounted for 12% of Facebook’s total revenue last year.
-That more than 250 million photos are uploaded on a daily basis.
-And that everyday there are 2.7 billion likes across Facebook.

And now IdeaScale would like to invite you to like one more. When you like us, you can get more information about interesting projects that we’re watching or supporting, you can find out about upcoming webinars, and learn more about IdeaScale offerings.

But we’re also looking to hear from you – what you want to see from IdeaScale, ideas you might have, requests for more information and great crowdsourcing and network intelligence stories that you find interesting. So please join the conversation and let’s stay connected.

And, of course, please be sure to check out the IdeaScale facebook application.

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How to Keep it All On the Up and Up

Posted on May 4, 2012 by | Leave a comment

As we’ve discussed in previous posts, President Obama has called for a new age of openness in American politics by saying, “we will work together to ensure the public trust and establish a system of transparency, public participation, and collaboration. Openness will strengthen our democracy and promote efficiency and effectiveness in Government.” You can read more about the Open Government Partnership and the Open Government Initiative here.

But new initiatives that encourage openness come with a need for new and substantial accountability. Because the government continues to create and monitor several new social media accounts on Facebook, Twitter, and social sites as time goes on, the General Services Administration has created a social media registry where federal agencies can list their accounts on 22 social media accounts (one of which, of course, is IdeaScale).

How does it work? Well, anyone wanting to verify that they’re actually speaking to an actual government agency simply

  • visits this site (it should be up and running in two weeks)
  • types in the web address of the government site that they are engaging with
  • presses “look up”
  • receives a result that tells them what branch that account is associated with and who it is monitored by

If, for some reason, that page has not been added to the registry, then the federal employee who manages the site simply adds in their email address so that the GSA can then verify it. You can read more about it on the blog announcing the registry here.

But this leads to a larger question of accountability for anyone who is creating and managing a social media interaction with the public. It means that it behooves you not only to be available and responsive to your network, but also to know who else might be speaking to them with your authority.

How do you think users should verify their social media interaction? What other things does the new open government initiative need to consider?


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Start-Ups Bill and IdeaScale’s Crowdfunding Platform

Posted on April 5, 2012 by | Leave a comment

The news has reported several times over at this point that the Senate has voted to approve the JOBS Act (Jump-start Our Business Start-ups), which (among other things) allows for the crowdfunding of capital of up to $1 million annually without needing to register the shares for public trading with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The amendments to the bill have been made and run through both the Senate and the House and it has been announced that the President will sign the bill into law on Thursday… that’s today!

What’s nice about this initiative passing – beyond the doors it opens up for start-ups and other small businesses, is the general approval on both sides of party lines about the bill itself. The bill passed 73 to 26 in the Senate and then 380 to 41 in the House once the proposed amendments were integrated. And, with the polarized politics that you so often hear about, it’s nice to see that sometimes they’re on the same page. And the bill has been known to be supported by the President for some time now, which is why it’s generally expected that it will be signed today.

IdeaScale (as it’s also constantly evolving) has introduced the ability to crowdfund on our platform. With just a few clicks, your project can be off and running whether it’s fundraising for your next dog sled race or raising the start-up capital for your new dotcom company.  And with IdeaScale, you can fundraise by ideas so that those initiatives that are popular rise to the top and generously grow as each new fan supports it.

With an industry that’s projected to grow by 500% by 2013, it’s no wonder that 90% were in favor of the bill that supports a new way of fundraising for business, the arts, and more.

What do you project for the future of crowdfunding? What would you like to see next from IdeaScale?

 

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Spotlight on IdeaScale

Posted on April 3, 2012 by | Leave a comment

It’s been a busy time for IdeaScale. We’ve launched BadgeFarm, we’ve been following up on the success of the Federal Mobility Strategy, launching the new initiative on Section 508, and loads of other behind-the-scenes stuff that you’ll have to look forward to in the coming weeks. But we’ve also been in-front-of-the-scenes as well and we just wanted to share some of the news.

Last month, Software Advice blog listed IdeaScale as one of their favorite customer service applications. Why? Because IdeaScale’s available for any mobile platform and not only helps assemble customer feedback, but also helps to prioritize it. It appeared in good company among other mobile feedback platforms including Tello and Gripe.

But IdeaScale wasn’t highlighted simply for its mobile and customer service capabilities, it was also highlighted in an interview addressing a new study by the University of Illinois which ranked the social media sophistication of various U.S. cities. While Chicago used to rank number 8, it now ranks at number 17 and in a discussion of that fall in rank, they talked about how that change is not so much because Chicago has fallen behind, but that other cities have caught up. They also talk about how some of the leading social media cities (among them Seattle) go beyond simply using Facebook and Twitter (and there are still some cities that haven’t done even that), which was praised for its use of the platform IdeaScale that allows users to submit and rate ideas for improving local government.

More than anything, however, these stories signal a sea change in industry trends. Customer feedback is now a mobile imperative and that feedback needs to be an integrated part of the user experience that doesn’t take the user away from the application that they are engaging in. Cities and governments need to catch up to their citizens – they need to be asking for their thoughts and suggestions at every turn: on Facebook and Twitter, in organized websites, and in crowdsourcing platforms like IdeaScale.

What other changes does this signal in the industry? What does this mean for the future of crowdsourcing and network intelligence?

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