Because Salesforce Ideas is built on the Force.com platform there are all kinds of ways to extend the application. Here are a couple of things which I'd love to see built by members of our community, and posted on the AppExchange. If you take on one of the projects, let me know and I'll be sure to promote you're work on the Ideas blog.   

1. Ideas In Action App: We've written about the "Ideas in Action" app that we created to turn Ideas into Projects and see them through to fruition, but by no means do we have a monopoly on this concept. It would be great to see a Services Partner build out a killer app and build a practice around implementing innovation management at leading companies.


2. RSS Broker: I'd love to see an application which consumes RSS feeds and creates ideas out of them. For example, you might want to pull in news stories about your company or your industry and let the community vote on them. This is also pretty similar to the way the Successforce homepage works. Content is posted to our 25 blogs and the posts appear on the homepage with voting buttons next to them.


3. Email-to-Apex: There was a post with a code snippet for Email-to-Apex, but I think that's just the tip of the iceberg with what you can do with this exciting new technology. Rather than just submit ideas, it would be great if you were to leverage suggested duplicates and return an email to the individual saying, "We found a couple similar ideas. Do you still want to submit your idea, or would you like to add it as a comment to one of the other ideas listed below."


4. Visualforce Pages: Visualforce pages open up all kinds of possibilities for what you could create. With each seasonal release Salesforce creates an Index page highlighting ideas that have been executed on. It would be interesting to turn the concept of "Ideas Under Consideration, Ideas Coming Soon, and Ideas Delivered" into slick Visualforce Pages.


5. Account & Contact Integration: I've seen people begin to play with the integration between Ideas and Contacts. They've created a related list which show you what ideas a contact has submitted, voted on, and commented on. The same concept could also be applied to Accounts. This is a killer example of CRM integration and I bet there are lots of ways  to enhance it.


6. Email Notification: Today there is the concept of My Inbox and we are working towards RSS, but often times people want an email notifying them of new ideas and comments. This might be a simple workflow rule or it might be logic that sits on top of the My Inbox feature. Similar to Facebook, if you can find a way to instigate those "friend requests" then you have a way of drawing people back to your community.

This post from Jakob Nielsen, a leading web usability consultant, highlights a couple reasons why creating an internal community such as Salesforce Ideas can be particularly powerful. 

• A company's employees are an actual community with a crucial shared interest: succeeding in business.
• Employees are pre-vetted: they've been hired and thus presumably have a minimum quality level. In contrast, on the Web, most people are bozos and not worth listening to.
• Although some intranet communities — such as those around internal classified ads — are aimed at lightening up the workplace, most intranet communities are tightly focused on company projects. Discussions stay on topic rather than wandering all over the map.
• Intranet users are accountable for their postings and care about their reputation among colleagues and bosses. As a result, postings aim to be productive instead of destructive or flaming.
• Small groups of people who know each other are less susceptible to social loafing, so more users contribute to intranet community features. In contrast, Internet communities suffer from participation inequality, where most users never contribute and the most active 1% of people dominate the discussions.

As part of Google's Open Social Initiative they published a set of best practices for designing social applications.

1. Engage Quickly
2. Mimic Look and Feel
3. Enable Self Expression
4. Make it Dynamic
5. Expose Friend Activity
6. Browse the Graph
7. Drive Communication
8. Build Communities
9. Solve Real World Tasks

A number of these best practices have already been applied on the IdeaExchange (1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 9) and we hope to encompass more of them over time.  

This is a great article about voting from the Yahoo Design Pattern Library.  

Problem Summary

The user wants to promote a particular piece of content in a community pool of submissions. This promotion takes the form of a vote for that item, and items with more votes rise in the rankings to be displayed with more prominence.

When to Use Vote to Promote

• Users in the community have the ability to submit content to a 'pool' of resources.
• Some democratic form of judgment is needed, to allow the community to compare the subjective quality of one submission to another.
• A sizeable-enough community is required. Ideally, popular submissions in the pool should receive significantly more (dozens, hundreds?) votes than non-popular submissions

From time to time I'd like to post some insight into the way we think about he product roadmap.

Kingsley came across this presentation and I think that it embodies a lot of the concepts we use with Salesforce Ideas.

Starting on slide 48...

1. Make system personally useful     
2. Symboitic relationship between personal & social
3. Porous boundary between public & private
4. Allow participation at all levels
5. Let people feel presence of others
6. And yet, moments of independence
7. Enable serendipity
8. Most of all, allow for play

Some people have described Salesforce Ideas as a crowdsourcing app which I thought was an interesting  new category. For those who aren't familiar with the term, here is the definition from wikipedia.

Crowdsourcing is a neologism for the act of taking a job traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people, in the form of an open call. For example, the public may be invited to develop a new technology, carry out a design task, refine an algorithm or help analyze large amounts of data.

There was an article in Harvard Business Review called, Funding Growth in an Age of Austerity which talked about different ways to increase innovation within your organization;

1. Increase the ratio of innovators to the total number of employees.
2. Increase the ratio  of radical innovation to incremental innovation.
3. Increase the ratio of externally sourced innovation to internally sourced innovation.
4. Increase the ratio of learning over investment in innovation.
5. Increase the ratio of commitment over the number of key innovation priorities.

I thought these principals mapped remarkably well to the Salesforce Ideas product.

1. With Salesforce Ideas you can give every employee an opportunity to contribute innovative ideas. This is exactly what Dell has done with EmployeeStorm.
2. Salesforce Ideas provides a forum where people feel safe expressing their ideas, so you might be more likely to source radical innovation.
3. You can also increase externally sourced innovation by creating a community for your customers and partners, similar to IdeaStorm or IdeaExchange.
4. Salesforce Ideas are great for generating ideas from customers, but they can also be used to test concepts out new concepts. By getting lots of feedback early you increase the ratio of learning over investment.
5. This principal really speaks to management focus, but Salesforce Ideas does help the community speak with one voice.

With the explosive growth of social networks, the question often comes up, "What's Your Facebook Strategy?" I think the adage article below provided some pretty good advice.

http://adage.com/print?article_id=119918

Facebook claims the goal of its groups is for marketers to have these kinds of continuing relationships. Marketers can use a sponsored group to communicate with consumers via discussion threads and "wall" posts. Marketers pay to promote their group through sponsored stories on news feeds, which let others know about the group. For example, Champion formed a group earlier this year and is still participating in a message board. Ms. Williamson said she believes the Facebook groups are the closest a big network has come to helping brands create long-term interaction with consumers.

But hard as it might be for marketers to stomach, the most vibrant groups tend to sprout organically. Examples are the several devoted to Nikon cameras, where owners post photos they've taken, answer each other's questions about techniques and offer tips for getting the most out of the product.

That kind of affinity and attention is not something marketers can buy, warns Chad Stoller, executive director of emerging platforms at Organic. "Groups will form if there's interest; they will not form from an ad buy," he said. So how should a marketer react when groups form around their brands? "Often the first reaction is to spend against it," Mr. Stoller said. "The first reaction should be to listen to it and figure out how to make that group better."

The article above might be pertinent to your business, but we're also thinking about it in the context of the Salesforce Ideas product. It might be as simple as adding a new field to your Salesforce user profile to ask, "what is your preferred social network? Or what's your primary profile page?" This way if you find someone on Salesforce Ideas you can click through to their profile page and request an introduction. It might also involve writing a full blown Facebook App. For example, you could write an app to publish ideas you submit, ideas you endorse, and comments you make in your in your mini-feed. If you've got other ideas as to where we should take it, post a comment below.

Bradley Horowitz observed that among Yahoo! Groups users

• 1% of the user population might start a group (or a thread within a group)
• 10% of the user population might participate actively, and actually author content whether starting a thread or responding to a thread-in-progress
• 100% of the user population benefits from the activities of the above groups (lurkers)

I would expect a similar 1:10:100 ratios within most Salesforce Ideas communities, but because voting has a lower barrier to participation, the percentage of synthesizers might be a little bit higher.

It also brings up an interesting point about where to focus your energy. Should you try to convert consumers into creators or focus your energy on the minority who are already motivated?

The basic premise of Reed's Law is that self-forming groups drive explosive growth.

The world has moved from tune in broadcast, to connect with peers, to best facilitation.

A community can grow exponentially when they move from best content, to most members, to best facilitation.

These are a handful of companies who got this principal right so far.