Inter­est­ing con­ver­sa­tion starter, but I find Jere­miah often over-​​simplifies just about every­thing. Real­ity is, online com­mu­ni­ties are strong, but scat­tered and week at the same time.
Search for any sub­ject of inter­est on Face­book and you will find count­less groups that sep­a­rate rather than unite every­one into the same group. I searched for “Night­mare Before Christ­mas” and there are over 500 groups for the same movie.
This illus­trates the impos­si­bil­ity to bring peo­ple together and agree on one com­mon goal.

I’m not say­ing there isn’t any merit, but many “social mar­ket­ing experts” seem to believe the world has changed sig­nif­i­cantly and we can re-​​write all the rules. Com­pa­nies have been using social media long before there was a term for it. Tup­per­ware par­ties, net­work mar­ket­ing, etc.
The idea that the pub­lic will take over prod­uct devel­op­ment is a long-​​shot. Com­pa­nies have been seek­ing cus­tomer feed­back to cre­ate prod­ucts for cen­turies. The chal­lenge is that every­day peo­ple don’t know what to ask for, and there­fore experts are needed to define what a prod­uct should be based on what peo­ple want.
There’s an old tale that the head of Porsche col­lected their most val­ued cus­tomers and asked them what they would change. They said things like “more trunk space, smoother ride, more leg room” and he pointed out: You’ve just cre­ated a Volvo.
The point is that there is a rea­son we have prod­uct mar­keters, engi­neers, and spe­cial­ized func­tions. The pub­lic could never orga­nize enough to make it happen.

Thanks for your com­ment. Really good points. The dis­crete user groups using any prod­uct make it hard for brands to be able to round them up to cre­ate any kind of solid rev­enue model…yet, like you men­tioned, social media was around long before it became digitized.

I do think that prod­uct devel­op­ment is one way social media can be and has been uti­lized effec­tively. But we’ll see how it all plays out.

Hi Ghen­nipher. It was nice to meet you briefly at last Ignite.

I can think of one good exam­ple of using an online com­mu­nity for prod­uct devel­op­ment. Jake McKee pre­sented at last year’s Blog­ging 4 Busi­ness Con­fer­ence (orga­nized by Matthew Rein­bold). McKee is the “com­mu­nity guy” behind the Lego Mind­storm project. He lever­aged the com­mu­nity of enthu­si­asts to assist in defin­ing and devel­op­ing their last prod­uct. Made cover of Wired mag awhile ago.

On another note, I’m glad I found your blog. I’m more on the tech & design side of social media and appre­ci­ate being able to learn more about the PR side of things.