Know what a “splash stick” is? If not, chances are good you will soon.

Literally, it’s a small wand of molded green plastic with a cap at one end. The stick fits into the slit opening of a plastic coffee lid, seals it and lets you walk down the street without fear of the telltale signs of the morning commuter: those splashed little droplets of coffee on shirt, skirt or pants.

Figuratively, splash sticks may be the future of Starbucks, a multi-billion-dollar brand that’s looking to reconnect with its customers.

That’s because the splash sticks were one of the customer-generated suggestions to come out of Starbucks’ four-month-old foray into social community: its new suggestion-box Web site, www.MyStarbucksidea.com.

Starbucks was already testing the splash sticks in a few markets. But when the idea got 10,000 ‘yes’ votes from visitors to the new site, it moved quickly to implement the idea online.

The same goes for free Wi-Fi service in all stores—one of the first customer suggestions made on the day the Web site went live, during a March 19 shareholder meeting. The notion got 46,000 votes. On March 25, the site announced that Starbucks will begin offering two hours of free Wi-Fi service for customers with a registered Starbucks card (who will also put up with a few marketing messages from service provider AT&T.)

Other suggestions at the site range from the very practical (a shelf in the restrooms to avoid balancing a coffee cup on the small sinks or toilet tanks) to the peripatetic (a Starbucks “passport” to keep track of all the places you’ve enjoyed a double-pump Americano) and the plain old goofy (a Starbucks truck that roams neighborhoods like the old Good Humor man, complete with chimes.)

MyStarbucksIdea.com kicked off with a message from Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, the man who led the chain from 11 stores in 1987 to growth and glory during the ‘90s. He left the post to become chairman in 2000; but he’s back at the helm now and looking for answers to Starbucks’s current ills: profit declines, traffic falloff and a share price down a third from a year ago.

And one of those answers, Schultz says in his post, may be tapping the wisdom of the chain’s 50 million weekly visitors via this community site. “This is your invitation to help us transform the future of Starbucks with your ideas—and build upon our history of co-creating the Starbucks Experience together,” Schultz writes. “Pull up a comfortable chair and participate in My Starbucks Idea. We’re here, we’re engaged and we’re taking it seriously.”

Customers did more than pull up a chair. They formed an online crowd that would justice to a mid-Manhattan morning rush. Starbucks chief information officer Chris Bruzzo reportedly hoped the site would get a few hundred suggestions in its first week; he got his wish within one hour of the launch. By the end of that first week, more than 100,000 votes had been cast.

The MyStarbucksIdea site offers visitors who register at the site three ways to contribute to the idea process: They can post a suggestion, comment on another’s idea, or simply cast a vote for what they consider an innovation worth trying. The site’s algorithm ranks the ideas in order of the popular vote.

Ideas can fall into three broad categories: products, the store experience and “involvement”, which includes social responsibility and other community-building ideas. Visitors can link quickly to areas within these categories, such as ordering and pickup. They can also sort the ideas by popularity, recency, top all-time vote getters or most recent comments.

Ideas are posted in thread format, so readers can see both the idea and the comments it’s elicited from others.

The popularity algorithm calculates using both total votes and time on site, so the suggestions it highlights are those that are climbing the charts with a bullet. But visitors can also see how many votes a specific idea has gotten.

The current vote leader is an idea suggested on March 24, less than a week after the site’s launch, about encouraging arts and cultural programming at Starbucks outlets to foster salon-style conversations. The suggestion has garnered more than 95,000 votes so far and is noted as being “Under Review” at the company. A company spokesperson says the idea is being looked at to see how it can be implemented while being “respectful to customers who have told us they are not interested in such a program.”

For deeper feedback on their suggestions, visitors to MyStarbucksIdea.com can tab to “Ideas in Action” and get fairly detailed information from company spokespeople about which of the online suggestions are rising to the top within the company. Some of these are bylined cryptically (sbx_bean, for example), but as many or more go out not only with a Starbucks team exec’s name but a photo, making this section seem as much a customer-facing blog as a response tool.

Those responses can be quick or full and detailed, and they’re not all frothy cheerleading sessions. One post explains why implementing a separate line for simple drip-brew orders is difficult: Customers get confused when confronted by two lines to the counter. In response, Starbucks says, it is testing a self-serve drip-brew station.

And a post about recycling inconsistencies from store to store—the leading environment subject on the site—explains that waste hauling from commercial sites is driven by market forces , unlike the local laws that impose recycling on private homes. The post offers three solutions: “Hold us accountable; hold your local government accountable; and bring your own.”

Basically Starbucks has set in place a formal mechanism where customers can deposit their comments on anything related to their experience with the brand, then see those random ideas gather steam if it turns out they’re shared by other customers. They can get the satisfaction that comes from having an impact on the way a favorite brand presents itself or the products it sells. At the very least, if they feel their idea got a fair hearing from the company and from other customers, they should feel a bit more engaged with the brand.

The Web site is very similar in intent to the IdeaStorm customer-comment site fielded by computer maker Dell a little over a year ago. Faced with a series of customer-relations fiascos—remember www.DellHell.com?–the manufacturer decided to open a site where both critics and fans could suggest improvement in everything from products to packaging, elevate the best ideas and hear what the company was doing with them.

It’s known as “crowd-sourcing”, and in fact, both Dell ideaStorm and MyStarbucksIdea are powered by versions of the same collaborative networking software from Salesforce.com.

“We definitely looked at what Dell was doing with their site,” says Alexandra Wheeler, the director of digital strategies for MyStarbucksIdea.com. “But we had our own pretty strong point of view about how conversations were already happening in our stores about ideas. It was about taking the millions of conversations that happen with baristas every day and bringing them onto the Web. We’re already an offline community, so we were pretty well positioned to build that out online. It was a natural fit for us.”

Wheeler says the site uses about 48 “idea partners” within Starbucks to read the suggestions, offer feedback from their areas of expertise in everything from loyalty programs and beverage operations to in-store music, and find the ones that should be elevated for review and possible action.

Besides examining the suggestions visitors think most highly of, these idea partners are also tasked with finding “sleepers”—ideas that may be valuable even though they’re not winning those popular votes. Among those are coffee ice cubes for cold drinks and a Starbucks ornament for car antennas. For cars without antennas, a magnetized Starbucks cup for the roof.

“Imagine all the honks and waves you’d get because people thought you’re driving around with a cup of coffee on your roof,” HRHBUCKY suggested last month.

“I’ll take two, please,” added a fellow poster.