Behind the Cloud: The Untold Story of How Salesforce.com Went from Idea to Billion-Dollar Company—and Revolutionized an Industry

5.10. Play #61: Harness Customers' Ideas

We have been on a constant quest to grow our customer community, and we build offline and online forums to do so. In 2004, we launched a Web site for customers who successfully self-implemented our service, as a way for them to share their experiences with others using the service or with those considering it. Over time, we began to experiment with blogs, message boards, and other forms of social media. We had tens of thousands of customers giving advice—and we needed a way to take advantage of this phenomenon. Calling upon crowd sourcing models and Web sites like Digg, which allow users to share, discover, and vote on content, we created the ability for customers to vote on and rate ideas posted by the ...