Even mighty Starbucks is getting religion on social media. Jeff Jarvis has a piece in Business Week about MyStarbucksIdea.com, a site where Starbucks consumers can submit and vote on various ideas related to the Starbucks experience.

To yours truly, the most interesting aspect of this effort is that the site is not a pure wiki. In essence, the site accomplishes much of what a wiki might—encourages interaction with the brand, allows users to create and interact with content—but it does so in a way that is quite user-friendly. Part of that is attributable to the design of the site. But they also chose staff the site with what they call Idea Partners- actual Starbucks employees who respond to certain popular ideas and give updates on how they’re being implemented.

My biggest beef with most wikis is that to the uninitiated, they are often quite off-putting—from a design perspective mostly. MyStarbucksIdea.com does a nice job of putting a friendly face on social media. There’s a lesson to be learned here for marketers who are eager to test the waters of social media- keep the consumer’s cost of entry low. If I want to interact with the brand, don’t make me feel like I have to learn a new language to do it.

(On the other hand, the cost of entry isn’t zero; you have to register to participate. This is smart, too, as it probably prevents the hoi polloi who just want to disrupt the conversation from getting involved.)