How can social media help you create your next product? In today’s post Denise Tung shows us how to research ideas, validate our concepts and launch our latest, greatest venture.
Developing compelling products in the social context
We’ve learned at length about the benefits of Twitter as an information network for communities of interest (my personal RSS feed of choice!). Twitter continues to innovate in this arena with the trailing of Twitter Lists to improve the organisation of such information within communities. The notion of communities and social networks however is a much bigger playing field than just Twitter. Entrepreneurs in this day and age have a limitless amount of free/low cost online tools that can potentially deliver value to businesses, big or small across a range of disciplines. This post will focus on these tools that support your Product Development activities.
By typical product development stages, you have:
1. Ideas generation: in this phase, product, process or service related concepts are created in an unstructured, at times macro level. On generating ideas, the social sphere is a wealth of information that can help seed your idea from the get go. The likes of Social Mention can help you search through the web for conversations and opinions on a certain topic (my previous post talks about its merits further). In terms of keeping track of your ideas, there is ideas management software such as Spigot that enables ideas to be captured from internal folks as well as customers in the one spot. These same tools have also raised the bar in sophistication, allowing businesses to rank, assess and prioritise ideas in a collaborative manner with key stakeholders such as customers, partners and employees.
2. Concept validation: Aside from formal approach of investing in ideas management software, existing communities in social networks such as Twitter, FriendFeed and identi.ca , is the easiest and quickest way of validating your concept (all done confidentially, of course!). But before you start DM’ing your followers (followees!) with your latest idea, be sure that your community:
1. Represents your business’ target market or customer segment; and
2. Is happy to provide you with good feedback on your idea. (Ideally this group would be the same group of people who you can test the final product or service on during the test/market launch phase.)
3. Development phase: Kicking off development requires some orchestration amongst various functions (even if it’s you doing all these on your own!). If you’re like me, you would want to be clear about whether you will hit your target launch date along the way. Project management tools such as Basecamp help you set and allocate tasks, track progress against milestones via a secure online environment.
4. Test and Launch: Refining the final product is also important in the process of maximising appeal and ultimately sales and revenue. You can return to the same group of people from the validation phase and use traditional phone calls and emails to undertake this step. Emerging beneath the cracks is potentially a complimentary approach to customer interaction: Google Wave holds a lot of promise in tapping into your customer base to refine and improve your product offering. I can confidently say this as Google is currently using it to refine Wave itself! Which then leaves us at market launch, but that’s for another day!
TODAY’s TASK
Check out the links in this post. Denise has provided some great online resources. (I’m still discovering Google Wave, so if you’re having a good experience using it, let us know.)
