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Two of the areas I'm spending a lot of time looking into are the role of expectations when assessing customer satisfaction and brand research communities.

Here's a question - what expectations do customers have when you ask for business ideas? And more importantly what is the effect upon their behaviour when these expectations aren't met?

Remember the much referenced 'mystarbucksidea', the holy grail of social collaboration / listening projects. What were the expectations of those customers who added one of the 80,000 business ideas. How do those customers feel knowing only SIX ideas were actually implemented (0.0075%).

Some will argue that the customer benefit is at the time of adding the idea, not the eventual outcome. Seems to me that argument fails to take account of how the initial promise was understood. Seems to me if you're going to ask for ideas, better have one to explain if you don't act on them!