Interesting times.  Yesterday the House of Representatives failed to pass the $700B bailout bill.  The Dow fell almost 800 points during the afternoon, the largest one day loss in its history.  The last time I remember hearing those words was back in 2001, when the Internet bubble burst.  Of course the NASDAQ took a relatively greater hit at the time, but everyone was affected.  

It remains to be seen what happens next for consumers and businesses.  None of us have a crystal ball.  We do know that 7 years ago corporate spending slowed significantly.  For marketing professionals, that meant budget accountability.  More than ever.  The right-brained marketers were searching for their left-brained muses to establish marketing return on investment accountability.

The events of 2001 changed the way marketers had to act (for the better without a doubt).  At very least, 2008 will probably reinforce those requirements.  It also spawned a new set of marketing tools to facilitate budget management and marketing measurement.  Here are a few of my favorites - Marketo, Omniture Closed Loop Marketing for Salesforce, Vertical Response.

Intuit founder Scott Cook’s "The Contribution Revolution: Letting Volunteers Build Your Business" (Harvard Business Review, Oct 2008) tells business owners they should harness the power of user contributions. However, it’s missing one important ingredient: how they should do it.

Cook writes:

First, you must learn how to spot opportunities for creating value from user contributions. Second — and this is the hard part — in acting on these opportunities, you must overcome natural organizational resistance to the idea of relinquishing significant control to people outside the company.

He goes on to call out two companies as doing a good job at crowdsourcing their ideas for improvement: Dell and Starbucks. Both companies rely on Salesforce.com’s Ideas product.

The sites:

• My Starbucks Idea
• Dell’s Idea Storm
• Salesforce.com’s own Ideas site

Awesome.  

Ideas addresses Cook’s first point: identifying an opportunity to create value.  Capturing ideas from stakeholders — customers, employees, etc — is key to any business.

And it addresses his second point by having the advantage of being a part of Salesforce.com, an increasingly important system within many organizations.  Having the results visible within a trusted and familiar system will help the output seem like less foreign.

Ideas is not the right tool for every user contribution management system, but it’s a good start.

Dreamforce 08.  It’s coming, and I’m excited.

Yeah, it’s over election week, which is a little irritating, but I’ll register for the absentee voting and that will be that.

Then there’s the traveling to SFO, being away from my wife and young son.  I’ll probably miss him doing something totally cool.  My wife will have the video camera in hand.

So why am I excited?

It’s not Journey.  It’s not the late night parties.  It’s not the great cheese plates.

So…why?

You’ll see.  I have my reasons.