There’s no doubt that social media is the way for businesses of all sizes to directly communicate with consumers. Going beyond this interaction, social media does provides direct feedback to businesses about their products, pricing, distribution, etc. Obviously, crowdsourcing, or social innovation, can be a powerful tool, however if you’re in the SMB category, collecting focused, valuable feedback from users, managing this data, and then deriving practical action points from it can be a bit more of a time investment than many have to make.

If you’re the person (or part of a team) that’s responsible for your organization’s social media outreach, chances are, you’ve already got a mountain of data sitting in your Facebook or Twitter stream. You’re monitoring what’s being said about your organization with a variety of tools. Instead of focusing on your output, let’s turn the tables and see what the output from your following community is. This is the very first step in crowdsourcing your company’s next move: Listen.

Listen

If you’re doing your social media related responsibilities correctly, you’re acutely aware of what’s being said about your product, company, service, etc… But instead of just knowing this information, how about a formalized tracking system of it? Meaning, if you notice a question or comment frequently occurring, make note of it. You could create a spreadsheet, mind map, word document, etc. The format is up to you, so long as you’re actively tracking these questions.

Ok, so you’ve got a list of recurring questions, comments, etc., now what? It’s time to start formulating some responses. Are these questions something that can easily be addressed through an FAQ? A detailed blog post that you can point users to? Maybe a quick and simple video?

If these comments go beyond the customer service aspect, congratulations, you’ve just crossed over into crowdsourcing. If you’ve got raving customers, how can you leverage this excitement to further the revenues? Are there related products, services, etc. that you can offer users? Are there any areas where you can expand upon your current offerings? Is it time to take a deeper look at this specific product line and expand upon it?

Now let’s be honest, it’s not going to be all sunshine and unicorns. Users are just as apt to tell you what they do not like about your product. Seasoned pros take the obligatory 2 seconds to roll their eyes, and then dig into this negativity with a heapin’ spoonful of, “How can we make this better?” Remember, these negative comments are just as valuable to your organization as the positive ones. Sure, not in the public light, but in the company strategy meetings, these comments are the ones that can drive further success. If your product or service isn’t meeting customer’s needs, how can future versions solve this issue? Did your engineering team even know this was an issue? Is it time to start thinking about killing off a certain product or service? Remember that tracking mechanism mentioned above? Now’s the time to start looking at those numbers and talking to the right people within your organization about some change.

Don’t forget about the unexpected. You’re always going to have a few (or many in some cases) who will use your product in an unexpected way, modify it, hack it, customize it. Take special note of these innovators, and make sure you keep an eye on them. Does this modification have traction? Are other’s wondering how to do the same? Can you build something that will allow users to do the same in the near future?

The Competition

Listening to your own brand and consumers is a good start, but you’ll also want to keep tabs on your competitors. I’m guessing that your TweetDeck (or similar) has column set up monitoring any @ mentions of your competitors. Likewise, either you or your “other” Facebook account are friends or fans with competitors, keeping an eye on what the other guys are doing.

Adding another column to that tracking spreadsheet, keep tabs on what others are saying about competitor’s products and/or services. Is there a specific service or product that they’re offering that your organization doesn’t? Could your organization build upon this offering, putting your own unique spin on it? Can you “one better” this offering?

Similar to your own monitoring, what are consumers not happy about with a competitor’s offering(s)? Does your product fill the void that consumers are displeased about with your competitor’s offering? If so, you’ve just crowdsourced your next marketing push. If not, is your organization agile enough to react quickly and build a solution to capture these unhappy consumers?

Coming full circle, what are some common questions that are asked of your competitor? Are these questions similar to those that you’ve noted? If so, wouldn’t it be fantastic if you/your organization were the ones to present the clear and definitive answer to this common question? Likewise, can your organization build or produce a product or offering that could simply a process that’s obviously confusing your competitor’s users?

The Big Picture

Keeping tabs on your organization and your competitors is one of the fastest ways to give consumers what they want, but don’t forget about the overall, larger, trending picture. Similar to your Twitter monitoring mentioned above, don’t forget to add a few columns for the big picture, or industry keywords. For example, if you’re in the productivity SaaS biz, you’ll want to keep tabs on “productivity,” “getting things done,” etc. Lots of these tweets won’t be spot on, but by keeping your eye on this stream, you’ll be in the drivers seat when it comes to, “What’s trending, and what do people want?” category.

Keeping your eye on the bigger picture obviously allows you to think about, analyze, and with a certain degree of accuracy, predict the future needs of your consumers. If you notice a number of “How do I’s, or I wish there was a …” popping up in any one specific big picture category, this could be your next product offering in the waiting.

Likewise, is there something that a large number of consumers are doing and associating with your keywords? In the example case of productivity, are users discovering a new way to be more productive? Does your product offer this feature? Are you promoting it appropriately? If not, can you build it in to your next release?

Watching the overall, larger trends can also lead your organization to produce solutions that consumers do not even know that they want yet. Steve Jobs was the grand master of this method, and he and his company benefitted handsomely from it. Isn’t it time you joined this brain train?

Obviously, the critical question you’ve got to ask within the framework of the bigger picture is, “Does this make sense for our organization?” Is there a large enough demand for such action? Could you capitalize on it? If you answered no to either of these questions, don’t simply write the information off, keeps tabs on it, as what was a flicker today could be a scorcher six weeks from now.

Thanks to the advent and popularity of social media, organizations are able to gather feedback and innovate faster than any time previously in history. Chances are, your organization already has a social media presence, and is already interacting with consumers on a daily basis. By simply adding the “innovation” facet to that interaction, organizations that shape the direction of their offerings based in part through social media user feedback are far more likely to deliver offerings that truly resonate with consumers than those that don’t. Which side would you rather be on?

Now that 2011 is behind us, the new year allows for new players to step into the startup game with brand new ideas and visions. Even though companies like Facebook, Apple, Twitter, and Instagram had massive success last year, there are still areas that are just begging for a tech makeover.

Some of the innovation will most certainly come from giant companies with a lot of money to spend and huge teams, but I think we’ll be surprised by how many smaller startups will take on big problems in 2012.

If I were working on something new, these are the areas I’d hone in on with laser focus.

Private social networks

Path tried to set the world on fire last year with its app that allows you to interact with under 150 people. It’s the anti-Facebook, if you will. With version 2.0, Path is closer to creating an experience that I believe more people will want to participate in this year, but the companies mobile-only approach is leaving a lot of opportunities on the table. I’d love to see a few other teams try to tackle this concept using the web, since it’s a clear path to bringing in mainstream users like Mom and Dad.

Google is on to something with its “Circles” concept for Google+, but it’s difficult to escape the feeling that you’re on a platform with millions of other people. A simple and personalized web-centric alternative to Path could really make private social networking hot in 2012. What Path is lacking though is the feeling of collaboration that is commonplace in a small circle of friends or family members. The app is still focused on the concept of the stream, and I’d like to see someone else take a different approach.

Local

Look for the local boom to hit us at some point this year. With apps like foursquare and Facebook letting us share our locations and interact with local businesses, there is still an opportunity for someone to build a platform that is made only to interact with your favorite coffee shop or restaurant.

Imagine being able to know things about a restaurant in real-time, like how many people are there, what the specials are, and even what waiters and waitresses are working that night. Making your customers feel like they have insight into how you operate will build a better relationship with them and keep them coming back.

Telephony

Everyone jokes about how we don’t use the telephone anymore, and it’s not because we don’t like to talk to people. The lack of innovation when it comes to telephony is absolutely shocking. The hottest thing to happen to the phone in the past 5 years was visual voicemail from Apple. There are companies working on re-imagining our experiences on the telephone already, but this is something that will be on fire in 2012. Skype gave us VOIP for computers, added some video, and that’s about it.

In the near future, we should be able to engage in synced gaming, note-taking, and other interactions while we’re on the phone. If you’re an AT&T user, you know how great it is to be able to check your email or the web for something while you’re talking on the phone. Sorry Verizon customers. This type of interaction needs to be made easier, and you should be able to challenge someone to a game of Angry Birds right in the middle of a conversation.

The technology is there, it’s time to innovate.

TV and web integration

The various hacks for Apple TV have me excited about the future of the television. This innovation is Apple’s for the taking, but with the potential for a fully interactive TV from Apple, comes a whole new platform for developers to build on.

Start thinking about what apps you’d like to have open while you’re watching TV or a movie. Text messages, incoming phone calls, email, Tweets, and live chat are the easy ones. But if you think about all of the data on the web that can be pulled into a broadcast contextually, the possibilities are absolutely mind-blowing. I’ve played around with Google TV, and its widget approach is just not going to do it. A seamless interactive experience on the television will surely be ours by the end of 2012.

Photography

Don’t run away, developers. Instagram doesn’t own the universe yet. There is a lot of room for innovation when it comes to photography on mobile devices. While Instagram has built a fantastic community around streams of photos with filters, there are sure to be more things to do with photos.

I’d love to see developers that use photography for do-it-yourself animation or do smarter things with the meta data stored with your photos. For example, Apple’s Camera Roll could surely use its own refresh. It tells me nothing about my photographs. I’d also like to see apps that help me stitch together similar photos based on colors or objects in them. Again, the technology is there, but hasn’t been put to full use yet.

Small and fast wins

These are the areas that I see the most room for improvement and innovation in 2012. The platforms are there, technology is there, and the talent to build great things are most certainly there. It won’t be the big companies that wow us in 2012, it’ll be the smaller teams who eventually build something focused and user-friendly that will.

What areas do you feel are ripe for innovation this year? Tell us in the comments.

Photos, Photos, Photos. Now that photography is all digital, we’ve got hundreds of them, sometimes thousands of them. With the iPhone, we’re taking pictures of meals, our cats and dogs, our feet, a funny sign, and pretty much anything else you can think of.

Taking photos has never been easier. Furthermore, photo sharing has never been easier thanks to services like Facebook, Google, Flickr, Instagram, and the list goes on and on.

Everyone is a photographer now, which is fantastic because moments that have never been captured before, are.

But what are we going to do with all of these photos? It’s an area ripe for innovation where I’m personally seeing little or none.

Photo Hosting

Photo hosting is somewhat easy for startups to get into, since cloud storage has become so cheap on services like Amazon EC2. Facebook has developed amazing technology to host photos for over 800 million users, with next to zero downtime. Google, with its infinite server farms, can host photos for every person in the world. Apple has gotten into the game as well with iCloud, sending photos that you take from your iPhone or iPad and sending it to the sky forevermore. Shoot, even Twitter will host your photos now. These services let you host them there and maybe let you categorize them into albums, but that’s about it.

As far as I’m concerned, the best photo feature I’ve seen in years comes from photo host Snapjoy. They let you see a random photo, and give you simple shuffle button.

But so what? You’re storing our photos. That’s just not enough anymore. What’s next?

Photo Sharing

Photo sharing is something that most of us do with the really great photos that we’re proud of. Be it an artistic shot, or a photo of a street sign that says something ridiculous, we’re posting them on the internet for the world to see. The thing with photo sharing though, is that they’re sent into a stream of a zillion other posts.

When I post a photo on Twitter or even Google+, perhaps 50 of my 15,000+ followers are paying attention at any given second.

Twitter now shares the photos that you’ve posted recently in a place that gets the least amount of traffic, your profile. How much time do you spend on someones profile on Twitter? Not a lot. So that’s just not going to cut it. Google+ has photo albums using its Picasa platform, but it still feels disconnected from the overall experience.

Facebook lets you tag people in photos, which is very social, and even has facial recognition software behind it now. This still feels like a utility sharing overall, but maybe Timeline will bring older photos back to life.

Flickr was the absolute best place to share photos, because the community that used Flickr really used Flickr. We used to spend hours pouring through photos, commenting on them, and marking favorites. And then Yahoo! bought them, and the innovation, heart, and soul died.

Instagram has picked up the slack for Flickr by letting you share a photo, slap a filter on it, and post it to a…stream. Mind you, Instagram has done a wonderful job with its “Popular” feature, which lets you see the photos that have been liked the most on the platform. A real community is building there, and since it’s completely mobile, people are interacting there a lot. It still needs work though.

What’s next for photo sharing?

Photo Editing

Photoshop is great, but requires a lot of attention to detail that most normal folks just don’t have. Editing a single photo requires time and passion. A lot of the photos are tossing into a stream don’t feel like there’s enough passion behind them to spend a half hour making them pretty using Photoshop. It’s also expensive software.

I’m excited that Google purchased Picnik, because it’s a nice editing tool that should evolve under Google’s wing, but as we know with Google, products sometimes get purchased and die. I’d hate to see that happen to a product like Picnik.

You could count Instagram as a photo editor, because of its filters and effects, but it’s a bit of a stretch.

Photo editing just isn’t something that has been innovated on enough to make the average Joe and Jill want to do it. But why not? Hosting is bountiful, and sharing is simple!

Photo cards and postcards

Now we’re getting somewhere. We have a ton of photos, putting them on postcards or greeting cards is a perfect way to bring moments to life in a new and physical way.

Apple Card launched, Postagram is doing well, so that’s a space I’d like to see evolve as well. Surely cards and postcards aren’t the only ways to bring a photo to life in a unique way. Digital prints are just boring, so I won’t even spend time on them.

My point is, photos have been around for a long time. It used to be really expensive and time-consuming to get photos taken and developed. You don’t have to do those things anymore, so we’re taking and taking photos, storing them all over the world, and we’re doing nothing with them other than share them briefly, get a comment or ten, and forget about them. I’m seeing some interesting things starting to happen with Instagram’s API, which is a step in the right direction.

Startups, it’s time to start innovating in photography. Fast. It’s a golden opportunity to give us something to do with amazing moments taken and shared in real-time. It’s the day after we take the photos though that the real innovation can begin. Even further innovation can take place on photos we took years ago. Yes, years. Remember those?

If you’ve seen great apps and companies doing new and cool things with Photos, drop them in the comments!

Check out this BBC feature on Real Future Store, a concept store in Germany where the biggest retailers try out the latest technologies and ideas on both the staff and the customers.

Using new concepts, ideas, concepts and new technologies, the company looks for ways to revolutionize the shopping experience. If it is good enough and the customers respond well to the ideas, it gets rolled out to other super markets. Pretty neat, huh?

If you have some awesome ideas on how to improve the supermarket experience, we’d like to hear them in the comments section.