Forrester’s new book, Empowered, (which is free for U.S. based Amazon Kindle owners from September 7 to 10!) helps companies thrive in the new era of disruptive technologies like social media and mobility. Authored by two of my amazing Forrester colleagues, Josh Bernoff and Ted Schadler, Empowered tells companies to give their most innovative employees – their highly engaged and resourceful operatives, or HEROes – the permission and tools to serve customers using these same emerging technologies.

But Empowered isn’t only about employees. It also lays out a strategy for engaging your most influential customers. Consumer product strategy professionals should wield Empowered concepts for exactly that reason – to energize your best customers. In the mobile space, product strategists are looking for ideas to help them develop innovative, leading-edge applications for Smartphone users on platforms like the iPhone or Android. So we’ve just released a report to help product strategists do just that, called “Designing A Mobile Empowered Product Strategy.” It applies ideas from Empowered to product strategy, and includes numerous case studies of mobile applications that exemplify Empowered approaches.

Empowered mobile product strategies entail following a modified version of the IDEA framework (laid out in chapter 3 of the book). IDEA follows a simple process: Identify mass influencers, deliver groundswell customer service to those influencers, empower customers with information, and amplify your fans. For the mobile product strategist, we've refined this a bit, as this figure shows:

We invite clients to read our full report, and we’d love your feedback. Are you ready to build an Empowered mobile product strategy?