"No matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else." —Bill Joy, co-founder, Sun Microsystems

If you're in business or lead an organization, you're undoubtedly aware of the always-on, always-connected culture of participation online. The growing number of people participating in social networks — and generating their own content in the form of blogs, videos and even scrapbooks — is fundamentally shifting how we are connecting with one another. This change also affects how we get our news and alerts and how we are influenced by people we trust as we seek before we buy. Increasingly, it als influences how we make our voices heard when we like, or don't like, something a company or organization is delivering to us.

Rather than stumble along with rudimentary methods of engaging customers, prospects, employees and other constituents, many organizations are turning toward commercial software vendors who have created a completely new class of hosted software offerings in a category called, "idea and suggestion management."

If you've read "Here Comes Everybody" by Clay Shirky, "Wikinomics" by Don Tapscott, or even the seminal book on the topic, "The Wisdom of Crowds" by James Surowiecki, then you're staying abreast of the acceleration in companies discovering ways in which they can embrace their customer base and ecosystem for fun and profit (but mostly the profit).

In a growing number of conversations I'm having with business leaders, virtually all of them are either engaged in some form of outreach to their customers, prospects, partners and employees or they have initiatives in place geared toward learning how their organization can effectively engage people in new and online ways. With enough input from unleashed online participation, coupled with smart decision-making within organizational leadership ranks — especially in product management or strategy creation areas — the ability for a company to build and deliver the right products and services goes up dramatically.

One oft-cited example of harnessing the collective intelligence of one's customer base is the Chicago-based T-shirt company, Threadless. The way its business model works is simple: The community of 850,000 people participating online at Threadless "vote" on their favorite T-shirt design (submitted by designers within the community at a rate of about 600 designs per week) and those are the T-shirts that are printed and sold. Threadless is essentially "offloading" its design to the community and enabling the community to be its de facto product managers, deciding on what the market wants.

After experiencing a public relations disaster in the tech community dubbed "Dell Hell," Chairman Michael Dell took the reins of the company, revamped customer service and accelerated corporate transparency through blogging and other outreach. One of its most successful deployments is called IdeaStorm, a website that empowers the Dell customer, prospect and partner base to engage in idea submission. The community votes on the best ideas.

After registering on the site, users are able to add articles, promote them, demote them and comment on them, giving Dell an unprecedented amount of feedback and data about its products, services, brand, competition and more.

I thought it a good idea to visit this topic now on Minnov8, especially because there are signs the economy is growing and savvy leaders are looking for new ideas, fresh perspectives and different ways to engage with customers, an audience or an ecosystem. These ideas can be effective because of this new class of software that promises to enable an organization to engage people online.

In Minnesota, Best Buy is the "poster child" for this sort of engagement on a host of fronts. This engagement ranges from the employee-only social network BlueShirtNation (now called "Mix") to Giftag to the relatively new and well-executed IdeaX (similiar conceptually to Dell's Ideastorm) to Chief Marketing Officer Barry Judge, who blogs and uses Twitter. These ideas are highly focused on driving forward and engaging on as many fronts as possible so the company can truly understand how its customers and employees participate online. Thyese approaches are ensuring the company is at those customer touch points.

Though Best Buy is quite public with its offerings — along with an unusual level of transparency and engagement with the community and an internal culture that supports these sorts of risks — even more traditional companies like General Mills are also rolling out initiatives. One example is MyBlogSpark, to engage women who blog (dubbed "mommybloggers") in order to cultivate these key, household decision-makers on family nutrition.

But how would you get started?

Back in March, the site ReadWriteWeb had a guest author, Tom Powell from Co-Innovative, who wrote this fabulous post on the topic of idea and suggestion management and categorized leading vendors with an extensive write-up.Powell pointed out three categories of idea and suggestion management vendors and, while this category is mostly an enterprise-class software one, most have smaller versions that allow small businesses to get started as well. I'd encourage you to read the post, look at the vendors and gain a sense of this category and what is being offered (and look at their client lists to see who else is using this sort of software).

At a minimum, there are several ways you can engage people online immediately without big software fees, and these are effective regardless if you're a Mom-and-Pop organization or a Fortune 100 company:

Blog. Yep, the tried-and-true blog is remarkably effective for your organization as well as empowering individual functional areas in your company (or people in customer service, marketing and sales) to tell stories, be real and get messages out.

Twitter. I know, I know — everyone seems to be getting a Twitter account, but there are automatic ways to alert your Twitter followers when you post to your blog(s). You can use associated services to send an audio, video or photo "tweet" to them, too. It's a solid way to connect to the community and make it easy for them to follow you.

Multimedia. There are just no excuses anymore to not deliver video, screencast tutorials or product overviews, audio podcasts, image slideshows and more to enrich what you're delivering, tell the stories around your brand, company or service, and help people engage with your organization and buy your stuff.

Make it easy for people to interact with you and they'll tell you what they want, what they're interested in and what they hate about your products and services. If you don't enable them to tell you, they'll tell everyone else.

This is a follow up article from the Minnov8 post, Category to Watch: Idea & Suggestion Management