[Update: Dell has binned One2One, so I’ve removed the links — its new blogs are under an umbrella Dell Community site]
Quick update on business blogs. Dell has also started a blog. The subtitle of the site is “Direct conversations with Dell” and its about page says:
one2one is all about conversations. You are encouraged to speak in an honest, informal voice and to foster productive, candid dialogue that can help us learn from each other. We’ll listen, as well as post, and ensure we engage in two-way conversations. Our intent is to provide a timely and accessible alternative to more formal, one-way channels of communication.
I suggest you take a look at the content that it has produced to date and make your own judgement about the extent to which it is achieving this aim.
Update: Dell has noticed the reaction of the world and his blog, and judging from this post, may well change its tack over coming days.
Update #2: Great new post about customer service. Oh, and they’re watching us: “Since May, we have been searching thousands of blogs that mention Dell every day to see what we can learn and to identify problems we can solve.”
via Positive Impact
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It’s a domino effect …
I think it actualy validates one of the observations in the hunter-gatherer metaphor of Web 2.0: trusted individuals are once again the source of news in society.
Marc
Yes. But given how connected we all are nowadays, is the stone age metaphor really apt? An individual’s reach is now a million times further than the next hill, and their extended circle of trusted acquaintances proportionally so. I’d prefer to view this as empowerment rather than a retrograde movement.
I don’t know the actual relevance of their blog. It’s just another business blog. Nothing earthshattering. I would probably read an independent blogger before I would check out their posts, which I just did for about 20 seconds before closing the tab.
We’ll see when the novelty wears off… People used to have Websites with Guestbooks. Personal websites were big. Then someone made a better guestbook and they called them blogs :)
Real progress happens at a much deeper level.
Marc
Hi there Marc,
Of course these things will evolve, and I suspect the term ‘blog’ may seem very old-fashioned in five years.
But if, as a big company, you had the opportunity to communicate with individuals on a very personal level, would you not want to try to take that step?
Business blogs are a positive step, by every metric, if they do it right. It means they are taking the risk of publishing their exchanges with customers. How can they possibly get away with bad service under those conditions?
How many people are going to go hang around the Dell website?
Probably thousands, but I suspect they’ll be mostly made of Dell employees and the employees of Dell’s partners and suppliers.
They’ll fill the blog with chatter but that does not make them customers.
Marc
It’s important to have a blog for a company. Though the relevance for the day to day blogger might be in question.
I find blogs from software developers a lot more useful. If you track your comments with something like coComments, you know the instant that you receive any feedback. Useful.
Agreed, Range. Software developers can be a lot more flexible in any case. It takes very little effort to incorporate a customer idea of request, relatively speaking. Hardware people have to order their stuff from Taiwan in terms of millions of units, perhaps 12 months in advance. An idea about hardware design being better will have to go through 30 different people, and get mistranslated a dozen times in the process. Dell lobbyists should stick to keeping up the heat on tech support, IMHO.