EBlog

Dell goes Web 2.0!

February 19, 2007 | Posted by: Nicholas

Web 2.0 = blurring the line between customers and community and giving that community a way to communicate with the company. (The four C’s of Web 2.0? I think I may have something there.) Sure, tons of big companies have blogs and some even have stellar community forums, but only one, that I know of, has a Digg/Newsvine-style site that allows anyone to freely post (like Newsvine) and promote (like Digg) ideas they would like to see implemented.** Ideas like “Build computers not loaded with extra software” and “Organize the sales pages by need, not product line.”

That’s just about the most web-centric, the most Web 2.0 - wait, they’re the same thing - whatever - thing I’ve come across on this Washington’s Birthday holiday! And the best part about it is that there seems to be zero censoring or pruning going on by Dell’s PR machine. Why? Because then the site would be a raging failure and only push all these people to self-publish on their own blogs where Dell can’t touch them. Worse, all these people would just bad-mouth Dell for censorship rather than give them useful and actionable feedback like their getting on the Ideastorm site.

On a closing note, Ideastorm has to be the best possible name for a site like this. I’m sure Dell gets tons of ideas from it, but I’m also sure many execs at Dell feel like they’re caught in the middle of a storm as a result. Good stuff.

** Sentence nominated for “Longest and most link-laden sentence ever posted on EBlog” Award.