There was a great post in the Influential Marketing blog today called, "Letter To The CEO: 6 Ways To Help Your Brand Survive In 2009."

All 6 of the suggestions were excellent, but one particularly stood out for me:

Lock customer service in a room with marketing. If you think I’m exaggerating, I’m not. Only good things will happen if you force these two groups to talk to each other in a way that they usually don’t. Maybe you need to literally lock them in a room, or change a seating arrangement, or set up a buddy system. Whatever you do, by getting these groups to communicate more, you’ll uncover (and start to fix) problems you didn’t even realize you had.

Never have truer words been spoken.  But with due respect, I have a modest proposal for Rohit, the blog's author:

Put marketing, customer service, and real customers together in an online community.

It's fascinating to watch what can happen when these three consituencies get to know one another well.  It goes way beyond the occasional user group, letter, or focus group.  Done properly, all three will eventually be speaking the same language about the brand and product, and that's really what it's all about, isn't it?  Don't you want to have the continuity of relationship with your customers?  Don't you want to hear from them both when things are going great so you can pass it along, and also when there is trouble in paradise so you can fix it?

These are the kinds of things that an online community makes possible.  But it gets better.  Why stop with marketing and customer service?  Sure, you may want to control somewhat who represents the official company position on things, but why not at least subscribe your whole company to the community so that they're exposed to the Voice of the Customer?

Fortunately for us, the Helpstream product is ideal for this sort of thing.  In fact, one of the first pivotal meetings I had with our new VP of Marketing Bill Odell, was about how we can get more marketing value from our community.  In addition, many of our customers are actively working towards the same goal.

Isn't it time you got your marketing, customer service, and customers together in a community?  What are you waiting for?