I came across an interesting post by Kathy Sierra on The Creating Passionate Users blog regarding "wakes" and what I call co-creation. Its all about how you invite and inspire users to be part of a companies wake - where they can add value to that company´s products or services and innovate/co-create additions to the experience of that product.
Some marketing folks have talked about user-created ads, but if you let users enhance what you offer, by adding more features or even just by creating cool fan t-shirts, you’re much further up the passionate users curve (…) Being closed, or trying to keep others from capitalizing on what you provide (in other words, trying to keep the wake for yourself), is a bad idea.
There is a value being open and if your products are software, you might already build in API’s to open up to the surrounding world of potential co-creators and passionate customers. But how do you do it if your products are physical or non-software services? Kathy Sierra has a few ideas.
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Another example that I use, beside the iPod, is Firefox. Thousands of users made extensions that make the browsing experience better so that the Firefox-development crew can focus on what they do best; developing a fast webbrowser, not a jumbo-jet.
I do, although, think there’s a lot more to creating customer evangelists, for example I do not think that the Google API is the reason why Google is having a lot of success. The Long Tail might also be a great influence here. But what a great post!