Innovating and developing your brand with the help of your customers is a goal every company wants to achieve. This concept is so popular many materials have been published about it, emphasizing that a business, company, or brand should embrace their customers and place them in the core of their company. Obviously, the customers are the heart and soul of every operation. They are brand’s lifeline; without them, a product or service will cease to exist. Hence, books like Democratizing Innovation, Outside Innovation: How Your Customers Will Co-Design Your Company’s Future, and Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything have more or less explained how and why direct customer participation in any business is essential, regardless what the business is, no matter what the product or service is.

But no matter what these books say, the truth remains: collaborating with the customers is challenging. The challenge lies in the fact that companies have been created and organized to think by themselves, without putting premium on what the customers say. Putting the customers into the development of a product and the product innovation process was simply an alien concept. Instead, companies have departments to handle these. Your company probably has product development department who handles the production of these items, headed and manned by capable engineers. Also, your company probably has a market research department too, with people who are in charge of knowing what the people (specifically your customers) want. The results of the efforts of this department will probably support the decisions of the people in the company regarding product development and innovation. These departments are essential, of course, but they have limitations and are usually blindsided due to the nature of their operations. The market research department is especially limited to their research tools, mostly which could not capture what the consumers want to say. The department is also limited by what they think is important to customers. Hence, they really have no idea what matters to customers.

But Social Media has changed all of this. Thanks to the various channels and space available, customers can now say what they want to say regarding your product; and it does not concern them if your provide them the opportunity or not. With or without you, they will talk about their concerns, their comments, and their unsolicited suggestions. Without your prodding, your customers are practically providing you with the essential information. Your customers are practically telling you what to do. And they are doing this through Social Media. They are blogging about their concerns, discussing comments at discussion forums. They are even making videos and other materials about your brand, passing these to other customers.

If you use the Social Media to listen, talk, energize, and support your customers, then you will probably have no problems using them to innovate and develop products. The end result of these efforts is to give a place to the customers in your company. How you give them the proper venue for their discussions, you can use the information they provide to help you in product development and innovation. By listening, talking, energizing, and supporting your customers, you are creating a bond between them and your company. Through this, you are embracing your customers, giving them a place in your operations.

But why is this essential? Or is it even essential at all? The fact is, you can innovate or develop products faster by embracing your customers. And faster innovation is beneficial and powerful because you can move quickly, employing changes without damaging the brand and the product due to previous wrong choices. Embracing customers help you innovate faster due to the nature of Social Media.

Embracing the customers is essential because they can tell you what they want and what they do not want. This is essential information; after all, they are your consumers—they pay for your products, they use your products, and they consume your products. They know what parts work and what doesn’t. Your customers can tell you exactly what they think about your product on the proper venue—the venue you have created for them—once you have already established your relationship with them.

Most of your customers have valuable insights regarding the changes that you should make in order to make your product more effective. They also have ideas on what makes your product work. You can easily learn from these ideas if you embrace them your customers. But you need to make them feel you value their input in order to make it work. Because these ideas are generated faster (at least when compared to the insight from surveys), you can instantly incorporate them in your product. This isn’t to say companies take their consumers for granted before the advent of Social Media; however, due to limited technology and resources, the opportunities were slimmer. Today, however, you can incorporate their ideas into your brand and your product, supercharging your production.

You can also iterate to your customers once you have successfully embraced your customers. This will make innovation faster because you can instantly ask them succeeding questions regarding your product. Not only can they provide you with insight if you already have an existing connection with your customers; you can also ask them for insight regarding matters they may not have originally discussed but are essential to your operations.

For example, your company has figured out through embracing the customers that most of your customers think the present design of your product is too inconvenient. So you know that a number of your customers are unsatisfied with this factor, and you should make necessary changes. Still, this insight is not enough. This is why you should iterate and ask what part of the design makes using the product inconvenient. This is advantage of this process: since the response is quick, you can instantly process any information the customers give you. Furthermore, you can ask them new questions once you have processed the previous information collected. This process is like replacing letters with emails; emails are faster, so can say more things in little time.

But this isn’t to say embracing the customers can replace established departments in your company. Embracing your customers can help involved departments in their functions. Since the exchange of information is fast, it can instantly help development and innovation while keeping in touch with present trends and changes in the market.