Just when you thought Digg cloning was dead, Salesforce has thrown its hat into the ring. The company best known for their SaaS CRM is unleashing their Digg-for-ideas, “Salesforce Ideas”, into the wild. Although announced back in October, they are now releasing the product publicly. Now any enterprise can order their own clone of Salesforce’s IdeaExchange, which lets customers post ideas on how the company can improve their product.
It’s targeted at, and works best for, existing Salesforce customers with a specific community of customers. Unlike the free opensource Pligg, this software may cost you. It’s being release for free to professional, enterprise, and unlimited customers. But anyone off the Salesforce platform using the service has to buy a license, which can cost anywhere from $50-$100 per user per month. I’d recommend (free) Satisfaction’s help and idea board for businesses with larger audiences.
Salesforce is pushing the platform integration because unlike Pligg, Ideas’ will know who your customers are. The system will integrate with your CRM account to let only those users in.
The concept is pretty straight forward and a bit more exciting than a straight idea forum. Yahoo has even launched a similar product for their own use. On Salesforce Ideas Users can post product ideas to a moderated board, which everyone can promote or demote up and down the board. The most popular ideas, based on the frequency of promotions over a period of time, make it to the top of the board. Attached to each idea is a discussion thread, where members can leave comments building on the idea.
Salesforce claims to have used ideas on the board to improve their product, and even drive ideas for some AppExchange startups (AppExtremes, Appirio). After a year, their board has about 13,000 users, 5,000 ideas, and drives 100K pageviews per month. Dell runs an instance of the board on Dell Idea Storm, which it credits with the idea to pre-install the Ubuntu Linux operating system on select consumer desktops and notebooks in the U.S, UK, France and Germany.
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Nick,
Is this service via an acquisition? I recall that there was a company in the Salesforce incubator that was offering this functionality.
It’s based on Crispynews, acquired recently.
Does anyone know what Salesforce paid to buy Crispynews???
Nick,
We have been using an internal innovation app called http://www.employeesuggestionbox.com which has worked out nice, although its only for employees not customers.
Very good move by Saleforce, a nice way to foster and develop ideas for its product.
re Satisfication, that is a real joke, go ahead and post something there, then you will receive a response saying something like “you sure” or “yes” as possible answers.
Hey Nick,
No salesforce.com in the Crunchbase? Tchc tch.
The idea has been great for our product managers and partners, and our customers have been asking for it ever since we launched. We just *had* to share
Like Techcrunch wrote when Dell’s Ideastorm launched, “these types of sites are just plain smart.”
@4
Agreed, a good move by Salesforce. As far as Satisfaction I find their model intriguing, but would think that they would align more with companies like Salesforce in order to gain traction. If Satisfaction doesn’t get into the corporate environment they will end up in the dead pool in less than 12 months chasing what looks to be a consumer environment that is saturated.
there’s already fevote, and it’s free: http://www.fevote.com/
Open Innovation Platform Fellowforce.com launched two months ago the ‘Innovation Widget’, a Digg-this button for innovation.
View this free Suggestion Box 2.0 feature via http://www.fellowforce.com/sta.....tionwidget. Its like a souped-up RSS aggregator to manage idea feeds.
I hate SalesSlource, too in your face and pushy!
Don’t you just hate peopl and companies like that?
http://fakesteveballmer.blogspot.com
Digg cloning is like the california gold rush…everybody wants to be a part of it.
http://www.meetingflex.com
Social Networking + Video - Crap
Good for salesforce and their customers, but why would anyone actually pay to use this app with all the free stuff out there?