Eating Our Own Dog Food
I’m also excited because by eating our own dog food we are able to share some of our lessons learned. The entire rollout from beginning to end took less than 30 days and that included a week where everyone was away for the holidays.  

Organizational Alignment
The hardest part was organizational alignment. I started by creating a presentation where I outlined the vision, the project team, a tentative timeline, and open questions we needed to answer. The team consisted of our executive sponsor, our salesforce.com administrator, our ideas community moderator, a marketing manager, and a HR representative. I circulated the presentation via email for feedback and then met individually with everyone to get buy-in. I would highly recommend getting everyone in the same room, but given our time crunch and the holidays it was our best option.  

Implementing Ideas
Our implementation was very straightforward because all our employees use salesforce.com today. I logged a request with our administrator to setup the categories, add a side-bar promo and give the project team visibility so they could review it. We seeded the community with ideas and also added a page to our intranet explaining the goals of the community and who to contact with questions. When we got approval to move forward, I logged another request to turn it on for all employees (view, create) and to create a new profile for our moderators (view, create, edit, delete.) I also recommend defaulting the ideas tab on to give maximum exposure, and if individuals want to turn it off, they can hide it from their view.  

Dashboards and Executive Sponsorship
To introduce the community to employees we had our executive sponsor send a company wide email inviting users to participate. We also set him up with an Ideas Dashboard to track # of ideas, votes, comments by day, as well as the top contributors both at an individual level and by role. A couple days latter our executive sponsor sent another email with screenshots of the dashboard to further spark adoption. I can’t tell you how important this was. The spike in traffic after those emails were sent was obviously significant.

Moderation
So far we haven’t had to do very much moderation at all. Because individuals know what they write is tied back to their user profile, their comments have been constructive. We have had to re-assign some categories to keep the data clean, but otherwise moderation is a 10% of time type duty.   

Targeted Campaigns
Another decision we made which has lead to early success is the idea that we would kick off around a specific topic, the V2MOM. This gave something for people to react to and since the Corporate V2MOM is presented in February we are able to incorporate the feedback in an actionable way. Going forward we will look for new “lightning rods” to spark discussions.

We are still very early in our internal rollout of Salesforce Ideas, but yet far it has been a great success. Hopefully this inspires you to create your own community to drive innovation and improve cross departmental collaboration.