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David Armano recently wrote some new lyrics to an old tune at Advertising Age, bemoaning the continued reliance on flashy microsites, and appealing to a policy of community activity as the most effective – however unglamorous – strategy for building brand loyalty.

When YouTube arrived on the scene, we responded by putting our TV spots on it or – better yet – creating spots that looked like they were made by amateurs. Little did we know that the real action happens in the comments.

He appeals in the article to the My Starbucks Idea idea, which in turn appeals to Starbucks loyalists: "You know better than anyone else what you want from Starbucks. So tell us. What’s your Starbucks Idea? Revolutionary or simple—we want to hear it."

So that’s the big idea. Ask people what you should do with your business, and let them vote and discuss their answers. This is, in fact, the big internet idea (qua advertising) in general, at least as it’s developed over the past five or ten years. But, looking at the My Starbucks Idea site, I started to wonder if it was really working at all.

Monday, when I was taking a look at the Google Insights beta, I noticed that by-the-numbers, the only important non-geographical search terms people were using when they looked up my particular business indicated that they wanted to get it for free. Let me analyze that fact for you. Based on my industry in my area, what people are interested in is as follows (in order of interest): Convenience (how close is it to home?) and Getting it for Free.

That’s it. That’s the secret. People want things for free, and when they can’t have that, they want them to be easy.

Now, of the six total top all-time most popular suggestions on My Starbucks Idea (all and only of which are currently under review by Starbucks), four (4) of them are ideas to get things for free. So, is Starbucks going to get any ideas there that they didn’t already have on the whiteboard? Nope.

But where this starts to get really head-spinning is that the number one most popular idea of all-time involves using technology to get better conversations going at Starbucks. Which seems sweet at first blush: If there’s something that people want more than Free Stuff, it’s good-old-fashioned human interaction. But, on a moment of further reflection, and in a dénouement so incredibly poetic and unsubtle it could make Machiavelli weep, this is exactly what My Starbucks Idea is. And on top of that, the conversation’s about Starbucks.

I’ll be hiding under my bed if you need me.