Hows that for co-creation for shared understanding? ;-)

1) saves time/money
2) it's more efficient because you have a wider input from your customer base than a small focus group. Twitter and Facebook are your focus groups
3) you reduce the risk of failure because through co-creation or co-development with the end-user, the market is getting a product they designed.
4) if the market helps to develop these new products via social media, they'll likely talk about it and share with their friends their story

Listening is one thing for businesses to tune into the social media channels to guage and assess the conversations. Taking action with their audience in mind and in partnership with the development process is the challenge.

Is this close to what you're referring to in this post Shel?

Thank you for allowing me to post.

Kind Regards.

Apple's product launches are arguably the best and most successful in the technology industry or perhaps any consumer product industry. They get an absurd amount of attention and their products tend to make them a crazy amount of money. Why would they change this formula? You're advocating for them to kill their cash cow before it has even failed. Why don't you wait to see if the iPad is actually a failure before you say such things? Trust me, your reputation will thank you.

Furthermore you don't even suggest what Apple (or Google for that matter) should do to tap into this social media. What should happen? "Hey Twitterz, what should we include in our tablet?" If a company of Apple or Google's size actually tried to engage social media directly it would be a huge and unmanageable mess. The volume of responses and data would be massive and most of it stupid. 99% would be people asking for stupid features, people saying stupid irrelevant things or people asking for personal pet features that aren't actually important.

This is not to say that these companies shouldn't listen to customers. They should and I'm sure they do on some level, but a direct interaction with their customers in terms of product launches and product development would be both unproductive and unfeasible. I'm sure smaller companies who receive less attention (and crazy criticism) can have this interaction over social media but I really don't think it would scale to companies of Apple and Google's size.

Also, equating the iPad with Google Buzz is also a non-starter. Google Buzz is already in the marketplace and failing. People don't like Google Buzz. We don't know about the iPad yet. These products also have different bars for success. Google Buzz, as a social network, has to be widely successful among social groups otherwise nobody will use it and it will die. The iPad just has to sell a lot and make money. I'm pretty confident it will do that even if nerds don't like it.