Study Identifies Best Practices in Social Media for Product Development

A consulting firm based in Silicon Valley three professors of business of the University of Santa Clara have identified several best practices for the use of social media to accelerate or improve the product development process.

The report examines six organizations that have successfully used social media to improve efficiency, reduce the departure time to market and increase innovation as demonstrated in the case studies described in the report.

The authors of the study noted that more and more organizations are using social media to reduce the complexity and the challenge of product development, stimulating to explore the issue to gain an understanding of what works and what does not.

Among the findings:

1. The most successful social platforms in the study used specialized with pre-qualified participants communities. Social platforms (Dell IdeaStorm), correctly applied, discredit the myth that innovation cannot be achieved in a short, fixed schedule.

2 Adopt a repeatable model of idea management conjunction with an administration of the idea as EurekaTool platform accelerates the time to market.

3. Participation of the "virtual voice" customers can accelerate the design decisions and shorten time to market using content, such as photos generated by the user of products in use.

4. Implementation of features of the "social product", as RSS as a feature of software products help organizations received comments from users near real-time, personalized.

5. The learning curve is shortened and standards and best practices are established more effectively when organizations invest in a small number of people dedicated to accelerating the adoption and consistent application of social platforms.

6 Let customers help the strategy unit to contribute to the product roadmap and see the result of their input enabled a study participant to become more focused customer.