At the salesforce.com lunch last week announcing their new Service Cloud offering, they also highlighted salesforce.com CRM Ideas and the Obama administration's Citizen's Briefing Book initiative. Continuing Obama's use of technology to engage more effectively with the American People and to provide more transparency in government, the transition team partnered with salesforce.com and system integrator (SI) Reside to implement the Citizen's Briefing book on Obama's change.gov site. The briefing book uses the Ideas application to collect ideas on topics ranging from the economy to the environment and then allow people to vote up the ideas that they find compelling and important. Submission / voting closes this evening at 6PM and the book will then be used by the new administration to help prioritize their plans / agenda.
I have thought about that use case quite a bit over the last few days. I've seen some other interesting uses of the app, like Starbuck's MyStarbucksIdeas and Dell's IdeaStorm but this is the first time I've seen it used in an eGovernment initiative. The concept of applying CRM Ideas crowdsourcing of input to policy making with Digg-like voting to surface the input with widest support is a strong one. Both Starbucks and Dell have reported widespread adoption by their customers and attributed both some really innovative business ideas and increased customer engagement. Increasing customer engagement especially through ongoing conversation is one of the key's to "social" CRM, so will it work for government as well? I guess we'll see because it does look like this new administration plans to use technology to involve citizens in government more...social government (and no not socialist government), or eGovernment... Citizens actually engaged with government, maybe they're on to something...
