A good friend of mine, Neil o’Toole, sent me on an article in the Guardian which talks about a 1 million pound competition created by the Tories party for a company to come up with a product that will be used to collect ideas from the Public to solve “common problems”. This is great to see and we’ll see more of this in 2010. Too many people think that social media is all about social media marketing. Social media marketing is great for some companies for promoting your products and services but don’t forget about other elements of social media that are equally or more important.

In the example above the Tory party realise that if they just sit in an office coming up with ideas to improve how the economy is run they are not getting the benefit of input of millions of smart people that may have better ideas. So what they are setting up is a social network which will gather these ideas and they will implement the best of them.

On a smaller scale other businesses have followed this approach and have also been very successful. For example, Dell set up ideastorm where they are ask their customers to come up with ideas regarding how to improve their products. What is the impact of this? First of all they get better ideas, secondly they deliver what customers want and thirdly they reduce costs because they no longer need as big a product marketing team as before. So far they have generated over 12,000 ideas and implemented over 400 of them.

Or what about Starbucks who have an equivalent site for collecting ideas . How would you like your customers to tell you what they want? By the way, Starbucks also use social media marketing very well, for example on Facebook they have over 5,000,000 followers and most discussions are about starbucks coffee.

So I wish the Tories the best of luck and congratulate them on trying to harness the benefits of collaboration and using the wisdom of the crowd to improve how things are run in the UK. I hope that many countries and companies will follow suit as we go in to 2010. Happy new year by the way!!!