"Greetings to the mystarbucksidea.com Community" announces Starbucks proudly ...

Community, coming to a community near you. Here's the catch - the community is a virtual global community. Unlike the 'real world' where communities evolve, communities here can seemingly be built overnight. However, the overnight communities need to deal with 'real world' legislation.

The privacy policy below caught my eye ...

Your ideas area welcome. Your data protection laws from your home country are not. Starbucks is global, right? Does this mean they do not want to abide by legislation in the countries where they operate? They're a publicly listed company. Law-abiding corporate citizen? - surely.

I am guessing that there is a simpler snafu to their virtual global community. The My Starbucks Idea website is hosted on Salesforce.com servers in the US. That's an issue for EU privacy laws for example ... unless, of course Salesforce.com complies with the EU privacy directives on the US servers.

Refer link on the bottom of the site - the logo is the giveaway ...

My $0.02? Virtual communities can be built overnight. Social norms and legislation cannot. This means that new ideas and products need to be implemented within the fabric of the then-current laws and regulations. The answer for Starbucks above would be to have country specific feedback sites which comply to the relevant (local) legislation - where's the value in serving a global community?

We need to continue to focus on innovation rather than legislation wherever possible to keep up with the rapid technology transformation.

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