Today on the Change.gov Blog the transition team announced the "Citizen's Briefing Book" as a way to engage citizens in the political process.

The Citizen’s Briefing Book feature includes robust tools that let you explore a wide variety of submissions intuitively. By rating and commenting on the ideas on the page, your feedback will shape the final content of the Briefing Book. It’s a democratic way to highlight the issues that are the most important to this community and relay their importance directly to the White House.

• Salesforce CRM Ideas Chosen to Collect Ideas from American Citizens on Change.gov - Press Release
• Salesforce.com Powers Obama's Change.gov Citizens Briefing Book - ZD Net
• Brief Obama with Salesforce.com's Idea Generator - TechCrunch
• Obama Crowdsources Daily Ideas with Citizens Briefing Book - Web Strategy by Jeremiah

• Michael Dell Friends His Customers - Fortune Magazine
• Dell IdeaStorm - The Winner of Collaboration & Co-Creation Division - Society for New Communication
• The Idea Exchange -The Gaurdian

You can do PowerPoint decks on innovations all day long, but people have to touch it, see it, and smell it," Stanley says.

Harrah's is trying to make its innovation program less top-down through an Innovation Portal launched in June based on Salesforce's Ideas service, where employees vote on ideas. "We found there's a cluster of employees that are very avid users for submitting ideas and voting on them," says Chris Chang, VP of innovation, but he wants to expand that community.

Harrah's is studying the economics of making the portal available to the public, identifying specific areas and concepts for those idea submissions. Focusing those submissions on specific areas fits a philosophy that Stanley has held since he first took on the innovation role (a job he dedicates Wednesdays to, part time the rest of the workweek). His team established six broad target areas: enabling technologies (such as wireless and radio frequency identification); enabling platforms (cloud computing, service-oriented architecture, anything-as-a-service); "smart" service (self-service kiosks); interactive CRM; next-generation gaming; and expanded channels to reach customers.

A great story from the Starbucks Ideas In Action Blog...

On 10/7 BillMac posted an idea called "Free Cup of Starbucks Coffee for Voters" and it rocketed to the top 10 of currently popular ideas... It turns out we're going to implement the idea. It will work like this: After you vote Tuesday (11/4), head to your local US Starbucks and we’ll give you a FREE tall (12 oz) cup of brewed coffee at no charge (limit one per customer). The initiative kicks off with a 60-second ad during the final pre-election Saturday Night Live on NBC this Saturday (11/1).

MyStarbucksIdea.com by Starbucks. Among many excellent embracing applications, this one stands out. It includes thousands and thousands of particpants. They have suggested 75,000 ideas suggested. Some of the suggestions have changed the way the Starbucks company does business – including new products and service ideas already implemented by Starbucks.  -Forrester Groundswell

Jeff Jarvis wrote a terrific article in BusinessWeek on Ideas titled, 'Hey, Starbucks, How About Coffee Cubes?' It is worth reading the full article but here are some great quotes that jumped out.

Schultz intends to use Ideas to change his company—to instill what he calls "a seeing culture." Chris Bruzzo, Starbucks' chief technology officer, who oversees MyStarbucksIdea, adds: "It was also to open up a dialogue with customers and build up this muscle inside our company." He says Starbucks "stood on the shoulders" of Dell's experience—Dell himself shared his lessons with Schultz.

You could say this is nothing but a fancy suggestion box. Benioff argues no. "The dead-end suggestion box and the auto reply are symbols of corporate indifference and are no longer tolerated," he says. In this age of nonstop, immediate communication in blogs, wikis, Twitter, and YouTube, he says, "your customers are having a conversation about your products and practices. The question every company has to ask is: 'Do I want to be part of this conversation? Do I want to learn from it? Am I willing to innovate on the basis of it?'

Jeff also published an extended version of the BusinessWeek Article on his blog, BuzzMachine.
 

"We engage in millions of conversations with our customers everyday, and those conversations and ideas have helped shape the company we are today," said Starbucks Chairman and CEO Howard Schultz. "With the launch of MyStarbucksIdea, we are extending the Starbucks community online and creating a dynamic forum that enables us to capture and act upon our customers' best ideas."

Wall Street Journal: Starbucks Moves Aim to Revive Brand and Shares

The company also has launched a Web site -- www.mystarbucksidea.com -- for customers to offer the company suggestions about ordering, products and other aspects of the stores. The company wants the site to be a social network where users can comment on each others' ideas.

CIO Magazine: Starbucks Wants Your Ideas

Starbucks decided to launch its new site as a way to extend the dialog it has with customers in its shops online, said Alexandra Wheeler, director of digital strategy for Starbucks. Called My Starbucks Idea, the site is built on a hosted offering called Ideas from Salesforce.com. "In looking at the space, Salesforce is really the technology provider that had the application and on-demand software service that came closest to what we were looking for," she said.

Buzz Machine: Starbucks listens - at last

Following Dell’s Ideastorm, Starbucks has no opened a forum — also powered by Salesforce.com — where customers can make suggestions then discuss and vote on them. Starbucks, of all companies, with its loyal and opinionated customers, should have been doing this years ago. Every company should be doing it now.
Why does listening to your customers sound like a web 2.0 idea? It should be a business 1.0 necessity.
I don’t understand why companies aren’t falling over themselves to at least offer their customers this opportunity.

Suggestion Box 2.0: Is My Starbucks Ideas a Blueprint for Banks?

Employees appreciate the opportunity to voice their ideas to senior management and do their part in making the company/products better. The same concept can work even better with customers where you don't have to worry about favoritism and corporate politics.

The Guardian: One shot of coffee and two shots at changing the way Starbucks is run
BusinessWeek: 'Hey, Starbucks, How About Coffee Cubes?'
AP News: Thousands of posts flood the Starubcks Site
Boston Globe: Starbucks asked the average joe and boy did it get answers
New York Times: Starbucks Plans Return to Roots
Guardian: Starbucks lets customers have their say
Groundswell: Starbucks embrances customers' input
Time: Starbucks Announces New Upgrades
CNet.com: Starbucks caters to digital crowd with social-networking site
Mashable: Starbucks' Bright Idea: Launching a Social Network
Venture Chronicles: When Customers Vote
Social Media Insider: Eww... What's That Smell? It's My Starbucks Idea (take a look at the comments)
Beagle Research Group: Automating the Suggestion Box
CRM Buyer: Bloggers Hopped Up on My Starbucks Ideas

The digital space is growing rapidly. To keep up with the Web 2.0 world, PR needs to explore all facets of the Web to find ways to tap into consumers.

That was what Michael Dell had in mind in early 2007 when he posed a challenge for his team: launch a new tech-based solution that would unleash the power of community-driven innovation. To ride on the successful implementation of Salesforce.com's IdeaExchange in October 2006, Dell's CEO sought a partnership with Salesforce.com to take the concept even further and open it to the global community of Dell users. The solution became an online "crowdsourcing" community called Dell IdeaStorm.