ChasNote

Or did they?

Back in October, Asus and Intel (in partnership with FM) launched WePC, a social media site that invites gamers, business people, hipsters, designers and anyone else who cares about technology to help crowdsource the next generation of laptops. (More here.)

Fast-forward two months to CES 2009, and some WePC participants credit Asus with not only listening to customer input at WePC, but bringing some of the ideas to life within 60 days: Among readers of Engadget’s review of the Asus G50, one commented that the product idea was his, submitted to Asus by way of WePC.

Are the engineers at Asus that good?! I’m sure they’re terrific, but I also doubt it’s possible for any industrial engineering corp to launch a new product design that quickly. In fact, given that Asus is both a maker of Asus-branded laptops as well as an original design manufacturer (ODM) for other leading laptop brands, its product design cycles are likely faster than anyone else in the industry. But still.

Instead, I’d chalk this up to a happy coincidence: An Asus fan submitted an idea at WePC that was already under development at Asus labs. It’s a case of Asus knowing some of its customers well enough to predict what they want. And with this particular customer (and the other Engadget readers), it just got some extra credit for proving it.

UPDATE: I Twittered the above post. Four minutes later @ITProPortal reports back that Asus delivered on his PC dreams this CES, too.

At Continuous Beta, my FM colleague Pete Spande draws a distinction between the reality that conversational marketing can be enormously efficient and the myth that it’s free.

“That is the trick with Social Media. It isn’t free but the low cost of the tools make it feel free from a distance.

“If you go to where the people are (i.e. Facebook, Twitter, the ‘blogosphere,’ etc) you must invest time, money, and energy to stimulate a conversation. Marketers can and do create fan pages, groups, and even applications for very little money. But creating them and getting people to use them are two very different things. The people who become a fan of you your brand within Facebook or subscribe to your brand blog’s RSS feed are the people your brand has already converted. To grow beyond that base you must invest money, time, and energy.”

Many marketers are using social media platforms to create noise — getting customers to a fan page — without joining those customers in an actual conversation. In Battelle’s response to Pete’s post, he proposes how brands can begin to converse.

“First, finding the true leaders of a community you care about, and engaging them in a dialog about how best to join the conversation they lead. What you come up with just might be something like HP’s VoicePosts, Intel’s embedding code and support of BB’s OffWorld, or American Express’ Open Forum.

“Secondly, I like the approach of determining you have something valuable to add on your own, and you might become a publisher in your own right, as long as what you build is truly valuable. That’s how you end up with Microsoft’s CrowdFire, or Asus’ WePC.com

• Torque buy

(or come to think of it, American Express’ Open Forum again).”

From Engadget:

“True power is derived from the people, yes? Asus and Intel know this well, so they’ve launched a website called WePC, where users can draw up concepts and specs for new netbook and notebook models then argue about how fantastic or utterly impractical they are. In a sense cooperative laptop design is not new — we’ve seen groups of companies work together to develop products, and Best Buy’s Blue Label is somewhat similar to this — but Asus and Intel are going full-on populist (or at least the appearance of it) with WePC. The promise is that designers will lurk on the site and implement some ideas — probably (and thankfully) not including the ones that are completely whacked.”

My colleague Liam Boylan’s dream machine, the Waterproof Laptop:

UPDATE 11:55am: ClickZ coverage as well:

“Coming soon to a Best Buy near you: The world’s first crowdsourced computer, courtesy of Intel, IT company ASUS and Federated Media Publishing.

“The three partners yesterday launched a site called WePC.com to solicit the public’s idea on what the ideal computer would look like. Visitors to the site can upload their own ideas or discuss and vote on what others say.

“Sometime next year, Intel will review the proposals and produce computers based on the most popular suggestions — limited, of course, by what is actually possible (don’t hold out hope for a laptop that predicts stock market fluctuations).”