Companies are fundamentally changing their connection to their target markets, by connecting to those customers and prospects via Web 2.0 technologies. One example, highlighted further in John Cass’s blog, is Dell’s Ideastorm website. What you see here is an example of a company very wisely reaching out to its user community to ask for their ideas about what products to build.

They enable any person to contribute product ideas and offer a way to break it down by product category. In addition, you can promote ideas that already exist, discuss these with other users and see what Dell is thinking about the ideas created.

While this is a great start, and is an excellent way of reaching out to the user community for ideas, Dell is missing one critical component. Dell currently has no way of determining what ideas to invest in! They don’t have enough information to make an ROI decision.

A better solution is to ask for information regarding the target market the idea is to serve and/or information about who is presenting the idea and why that idea meets a particular customer need.

For example, is Dell more focused on business users or consumers? Within business users, are they more focused on large enterprise or small (and we can get a lot more granular than that). Within consumer, are they focused on the technology-savvy or the technology training-wheels consumer? Are they focused on the U.S. market or China ? Etc., etc.

If Dell knows what target markets they are focused upon as a company (or even within product lines), and they can map these new ideas to those target markets, then they can force-rank ideas so that a great idea is defined as one that helps them serve the needs of their most important target markets.