With the explosion of social media, the idea of customer engagement is taking on an entirely new meaning than simply offering a 1-800 number. Adobe, recognizing that it wanted to establish Acrobat.com — a suite of online collaboration tools — as a major player in that market, had to turn users into loyal evangelists.

A suggestion box wouldn’t do — company executives wanted to foster a real conversation with (and among) users. Lisa Underkoffler, principal product manager at Acrobat.com, decided to turn to Brightidea’s WebStorm software to help create an online forum unveiled in March 2009 called Acrobat.com Ideas.

It started as an experiment, but since the launch, Acrobat.com Ideas tallied more than 155,000 visitors from 195 countries. Nearly 500 ideas have been submitted from more than 1,700 users, 40 of which have already been implemented.

I had the chance to speak with Underkoffler and Matt Greeley, Brightideas’ chief executive officer, about the implementation.

CRM magazine: What prompted the creation of Acrobat.com Ideas?

Lisa Underkoffler: One of the key applications on Acrobat.com is called Buzzword, and I was part of that original team acquired by Adobe. As a small startup, we lived and died by the users telling us what they liked and didn’t like.

That attitude really carried over, and is important at Adobe — even more so with an online set of services like Acrobat.com. We don’t have a lot of direct ways to hear from users, so it’s important to know what’s going on with them.

CRM: Why Brightidea?

Underkoffler: One of the things I really liked was that they got our prototype up and running really fast — less than a month. That was fantastic. I also really valued the fact that the Brightidea team partnered with us and brought its own ideas and experience. We were new to this type of social media and contact with our customers. Brightidea’s team was able to show us a lot of case studies … a great partner to get us up and running.

Also, the fact that every four to six weeks there’s some new set of features coming out shows me that the vendor is investing, and trying to push the envelope as well, is great. That’s helpful to us because as important as this site is, the regular site is developing its own set of products and we can’t always invest time to think about how great it would be to enter an RSS feed, for example. It’s already there.

As new things come along, these guys are very aggressive and positive about experimenting with new venues and moving things ahead.

CRM: Prototype in less than a month? That seems quick — is that normal for a Brightidea implementation?

Matt Greeley: There’s a range, and it depends on scope of course — larger enterprise customers that want to go end-to-end take longer. But, because it’s an on-demand system, it gets provisioned immediately.

When it comes to Adobe, it is obviously very brand-aware. The company had the foresight to realize that brand is a major customer touchpoint — a lot of times, these types of implementations spin out of an innovation group and become a rogue customer touchpoint not aligned with the internal branding system of the company.

Adobe gets all of that already, and realized that it is a valuable way to engage customers, and as such, must be at the level of polish that represents the company’s brand. A lot of customers start quickly, but in the first 30 days, a lot of that time was devoted to getting the branding, look, and feel up to snuff. Adobe was a demanding customer in that regard.

We phased in other aspects over time — including the single sign on with users’ Adobe ID so they didn’t have to maintain a separate user name and password. Every customer is different and we try to adjust to their needs.

CRM: What excites you most about the technology Brightidea brings to the table?

Underkoffler: There are three aspects — first, we look to the Ideas site for wild and wonderful new ideas users have, what they’re dreaming of that doesn’t exist today. Those ideas are important to us because even if the idea suggested is something that doesn’t fit with our product or business plans, a lot of times it causes our development team here to think in new ways.

Second, it makes us wonder what would happen if we did other things, or serve part of that purpose yet open up a new set of features and functions we think a broad set of users will need. Ideas are important but the domino effect of what it suggests to people here at Adobe is incredibly valuable.

The third aspect is that occasionally, as much as we’re supposed to represent the user’s needs and most really are staunch user advocates, sometimes we’re just not believed and that’s a sad thing.

So, part of what I’ve been able to use this site for is prove to other folks in the organization further up in management that have been a little bit doubtful about the value of particular ideas … to say, “Hey, look — out of all of the ideas we’ve had, these are the most frequent.” It’s representative. So, these stats can help to validate what I already know. It’s been really important in a couple of key situations in which I really had someone else in the organization say that’s not important — yet the numbers were there and spoke loudly.

CRM: So, are there any new enhancements that reflect the battle you’ve had with upper management?

Underkoffler: There was a request for a table of content feature in Buzzword. That’s pretty ho-hum and it was on our enhancement list, but we just hadn’t gotten to it yet. A few folks on our team even said that they believed no one really needed it, as no one writes big documents anymore. There was some truth to that, as a lot of people use slides as a way of communicating vast amounts of data. Yet, lo and behold, it was number three on our most-voted for/popular ideas on our site.

I had them to go the site, and they just couldn’t believe it. It put a big smile on my face. So, it’s not quite in the product yet, but it is not on our next set of features developed nd released as we move ahead.

CRM: Has the number of ideas generated met or exceeded your expectations?

Underkoffler: Exceeded — I thought if there were five ideas, I’d be really happy. In our latest release, we had two new products: a presentation package and a table package … within each of those products we looked to the Ideas site for fine tuning, setting priorities, and used it to validate that we were on track.

CRM: As you continue to grow and expand, what is one of the major challenges you will face?

Underkoffler: How we keep in touch with the people who have given us their time and good thoughts into telling us what they want. We’re grappling with that. We take their email addresses and send a personal email back to [contributors] thanking them for really helping us out. Otherwise it feels like a black hole, and we want to really create a community here.

Communities take care and feeding … and the feedback loop is one of the most important things. Not a form letter thanking you for your idea and we’ll evaluate everything — no one pays attention to that. Rather, we need to send a personal letter saying some aspect of the idea came into play, and something we’re trying to do here. As the volume goes up, obviously it’ll be harder to do on a personal basis but we’re going to do our best to keep up on that.