What's the holy grail of marketing?
To not spend any money and have your customers do your marketing for you.
I call them "raving fans." My buddies Jackie Huba and Ben McConnell call it "Citizen Marketers"
After reading Ian Ayres book, Super Crunchers, I visited the author's website and dropped him a note with a link to my book review (I've noticed that authors like that :-).
He responded that he was a fan of the Excel Add-In for Data Mining (which I love) so I brokered a call with the product developer/managers to give him a private demo of some of the newer features.
He was very impressed by what he saw. Very.
And he offered to put up links to it, show a demo, and, in general, be an evangelist for the product...in other words the holy grail.
And we're going to keep the conversation going with quarterly touchbases to help evolve the product.
Now that's collaborative product development.