Sean McDonald, Director Communities and Conversations at Dell, posted a blog entry last Friday about a major update to the Dell Community site at http://en.community.dell.com, which has been consolidated on a single integrated social media platform based on a heavily customized implementation of Telligent Community Server 2008.5. Currently, site is in "soft launch" mode so that the project team of Dell and Telligent folks will be optimizing performance and fixing any bugs over the next 2-3 weeks before many more hyperlinks on Dell's other sites start pointing at this site and referring much more traffic to it.
I am very excited and feel quite honored to have Dell as a customer because they truly believe in the power of social media and online community for all phases of the product cycle, and they're willing to take big bold steps forward. For instance, the design of their new site, which is consistent across all types of social media (e.g. blogs, forums, and wikis), has caused quite a bit of negative feedback (274 replies and counting) from many of the users of the previous forums environment. I'm happy to see that the Dell team is not only actively responding in the forums but is also smartly leveraging wikis to provide useful information.
Dell was awarded the 2008 Brand of the Year by the Society for New Communications Research a few weeks ago. As stated on the SNCR site, "The Brand of the Year is awarded to the organization that made the most significant advances in utilizing new communications and social media tools, technologies, and practices." It would not surprise me if Dell wins this award again for 2009 because they continue to push the envelop as evidenced by their new community site.
P.S. In case you're wondering what a close to default Community Server 2008.5 site looks like, take a look at the recently launched Microsoft Windows Team Blog for which the announcement post caused only 23 (mostly positive) responses. :-)
Posted
Nov 10 2008, 02:04 PM
by
Lawrence Liu