The news earlier this week that Starbucks will start providing free WiFi in the majority of its U.S. stores has been portrayed by in some quarters as a competitive countermeasure to McDonald’s free WiFi initiative.

But another view of Starbucks’ new “bums on seats” ploy (alongside the launch of a new instore digital information network featuring content from iTunes, The New York Times and Zagat) is that the Seattle coffee company is taking a further step in listening to its customers and seeking to reconnect with them after a period in the early part of this decade when, by its own admission, it had begun to lose touch.

Ever since CEO Howard Schultz took back direct control of the company in 2008, Starbucks has demonstrated a sharp focus on social media initiatives that are recognised as best practice in the burgeoning social media sector. As Alexandra Wheeler, Digital Director for Starbucks explains, reconnecting with customers through social media became a priority at Starbucks. Embracing social media lets us “hear our customers in a way we hadn’t before. When you grow to the scale of our size hearing becomes more challenging,” she says.

Central to Starbucks dedication to customer engagement is MyStarbucksIdea. It launched a little over two years ago and embraced the principle that creating a special online network for Starbucks’ customers to share their likes and dislikes about the coffee chain would not only give customer service a barometer of online opinion but that the company could both learn and act on customer suggestions. The company established a rating system where customers would vote on what ideas they thought were really important and each month the top-rated ones were taken for consideration Starbucks executive team.

Though sometimes dismissed as a PR smokescreen in some parts of the media and social mediasphere, Wheeler insists that the success of MyStarbucksIdea speaks for itself. She notes that some 70 customer-generated ideas have now been embraced by the company even if some ideas take long to be acknowledged than other – free WiFi in stores has been one of the most requested initiatives by Starbucks customers.

A project as bold as MyStarbucksIdea only gets greenlighted if it has executive level buy-in. “It started at the top with Howard [Schultz] working with myself and Chris Bruzzo [VP of Marketing] to bring it to fruition.” But for Starbuck’s flagship social media experiment to have real value and not just be a PR stunt, the company had to involve all the relevant parts of the operation. That meant winning over the entire leadership team and impressing on them that by committing resources and people to MyStarbucksIdea – whether they were from customer service, marketing, R&D or even supply chain management – social media was going to make Starbucks stronger.

In short, if Starbucks announced it cared about customer ideas then it had to have the right people to respond to those ideas. “We had those in charge of espresso beverages listening to espresso ideas. Everyone had to be relevant engaging in the conversation,” says Wheeler.

It wasn’t an immediate lovefest. Some parts of the organisation took more convincing than others that customer insight offered a path to a better business. The leadership social media message took some “reinforcement” says Wheeler but slowly it permeated through Starbucks partners (as they call their employees). Today, Starbucks also has a highly active Twitter engagement programme and is at the forefront of geolocation social commerce, partnering with current media darling Foursquare. Two years on from the launch of MyStarbucksIdea, the company has six people in the U.S. involved full or part-time in community engagement and 50 people on a part-time basis working on MyStarbucksIdea.

For Wheeler it’s the combination of understanding that social is embedded in the roots of a coffee house experience married with the potential social tools bring for meaningful customer interaction that keeps her and company committed to social media. Most important though, she says, is understanding that social media allows the company to demonstrate its commitment to its community. “We have incredibly passionate customers who want to engage and this is precious. Our responsibility is to look after that relationship and honor it.”

Alexandra Wheeler, Digital Director of Starbucks will be speaking at Social Media Influence conference on June 22. There’s just a few tickets left so register today.