The new EBay Garden isn’t tremendously exciting and certainly not a game-changer, but it’s an excellent idea that combines engagement with focus group tactics to market and evaluate new ideas and products. It’s an idea well worth emulating. EBay just created this online Garden, asking Web visitors to give feedback. So simple. The landing page is simply designed as well, but it’s a peaceful look and a venture that also reaches out to people for what they most want to give – their opinion.

There’s a lot of this going around, or at least there should be. In fact, if you’ve never thought that ideas come from the most surprising places, you have to read Seth Godin’s Tribes. This prolific author and Internet marketing guru is founder and CEO of online community and publishing platform Squidoo, and may well be the most popular business blogger in the world. Squidoo’s motto: someone somewhere wants to know what you think.

In Tribes, Godin expounds on one simple idea – that managers and leaders are not always, and not even usually, the same people. What this means for publishers, broadcasters and any executive of any company anywhere that wants to grow and evolve, is that if you’re only listening to your managers, you’re missing opportunities for evolutionary change. Add to this Tribes concept the EBay Garden idea of marketing your new ideas with a landing page where your online visitors can help “water them” you not only have crucial feedback on what you and your staff are creating but you have a following from the creation’s get go.

We want to suggest you carry this one step further, and to continue in the “gardening” vein, don’t just ask your visitors to have a seat on the garden bench and tell you how they like the flowers and plants that blossom. Hand them a shovel and let them start planting as well. What would be the harm in saying, “Hey newspaper or broadcaster site visitor, if you have an idea you’d like to see us implement, post it here.” Then you could open those ideas up to the online community, creating a community garden for your very own picking.

You might even allow visitors to share with the other “gardeners” the ideas that other media – even your competitors – have implemented. While that might seem counterproductive, they’re on YOUR site, right? This could very well open up the possibility for vendor advertising. “Hey, mobile ad vendor, look at the discussion we’re having at the WXYZ Garden about mobile advertising. Wouldn’t that be a good spot for you?” Or, “Hello ms. fashion site owner. Our predominantly female visitors are talking about online marketplace features in our Daily Times Garden. Why don’t we share listings and in turn we’ll put your ad in our Garden?”

Create a tribe of innovators, no matter who and where they are, and bring them to your media garden. Watch your ideas bloom and your revenue grow.