Reaching Consumers Who Will Help Product Development

Having established a need or desire to engage with a consumer community to help product and service development, how do you find, target, and engage the appropriate people? Locating the right channels, forums, and communities is not hard, but this should depend on the level of input that you are looking for, at what stage of development you are, and how open you can be with those consumers. Deriving a persona from your available data will provide a quick, lower-risk assessment of to whom you should be talking; don't assume that Creators will automatically be the best users with which to engage.