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Dell Modernizes Ideastorm

This article is more than 10 years old.

Dell last week very quietly released a significantly updated version of its groundbreaking IdeaStorm. I'm glad to see it. The old version had become a bit long of tooth. Considering that IdeaStorm just celebrated its fifth birthday, it is surprising how fast state-of-the art social platforms can age.

IdeaStorm has always seemed to be a point of pride for Michael Dell, chairman and CEO.  According to several accounts, he was hosting a roundtable when a corporate blogger suggested the idea. The site was launched a few months later and received immediate accolades. The company founder often mentions the site when discussing his company’s social media accomplishments.

The original IdeaStorm was essentially an online suggestion box. Dell customers suggested ways the company could improve products, features and support and a Dell representative might respond. Sounds mundane now, perhaps, but in 2007 it was a bold move journeying where no enterprise had gone.

At the time, most companies didn’t like to be told in public how to improve. Large organizations shuddered at possibly being shouted at. Social networks like Facebook and Twitter were still nascent and often dismissed as venues for light banter by brand thinkers.

IdeaStorm positioned Dell as a forward-thinker that recognized that the people they served might have some good thoughts on how to serve them.

In its five-year-tenure, IdeaStorm has received nearly 15,000 suggestions and has made about 500 refinements based on them. Most were nice little tweaks such as backlit keyboards. The most famous was a Linux-based operating system.My favorite was ensuring that its global support staff were fluent in the language that callers spoke.

But almost all of these suggestions came in the first 2.5 years. Some time after that, Dell's social media attention apparently moved on to other projects. While the IdeaStorm community kept coming to the site, Dell representatives drifted off.  Only one community manager was served to a constituency that once was over a million members strong and the user suggestions were piling up and gathering dust.

By the time Bill Johnston, joined Dell as director of online communities in April 2010, Ideastorm was being regarded as a legacy property.  Johnston is a pioneer in communities. In 1999, he helped launch Tech Republic, now part of CNET. In 2002, he spearheaded one of the first successful online enterprise communities for Autodesk. Most of today's enterprise communities still contain components begun during Johnston's tenure at Autodesk.

"The process for getting ideas back into the company had become convoluted," he told me. "And it wasn’t clear who was on point to fix it."

Many IdeaStorm community members wandered off but many stayed and they were not happy about the atrophy. According to Johnston, "It was on the verge of revolt. They thought Dell had become disrespectful."

One of the harshest critics was Cy Jervis, a communications supervisor for a 911 dispatch service near Orlando, Florida. [By odd coincidence, Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey built that popular social network on technology he first built in an attempt to move emergency ambulance dispatch online in Oakland, California].

Jervis, a longtime Dell customer, was early to the IdeaStorm party, enrolling shortly after the site went live. "I hadn’t seen any other company make such a bold move and I had plenty of ideas to share," he recalled.

If Dell was not engaging customers on IdeaStorm at the time, the customers soon discovered they could engage each other. "I met other people who also were passionate about Dell and the path they should take as a company.  We had some great debates on the correct course for Dell. Over time, friendships formed and visiting the site was more about checking in on my new friends."

As Johnston tells it, by 2010 Jervis had emerged as "IdeaStorm's most active and vocal community member." That didn't mean he was happy with the site. In early 2011, Jervis posted a challenge to IdeaStorm, saying it would work a lot better if Dell joined the conversation rather than just watching.

It was one of those slap-yourself-on-the forehead moments. Dell is generally regarded as an enterprise social media thought leader. And the power of social media is generally regarded as evolving from message-sending monologue into company-customer dialogue.

While IdeaStorm had begun conversationally, it had deteriorated in a reverse-direction monologue as company participation ebbed. It had simply reversed the usual direction. While many companies try to talk to customers without listening, IdeaStorm listened to customers without talking. Jervis was simply suggesting the obvious. Dell should join the conversation it had started.

Michael Dell's read the Jervis post and made it clear internally that he thought Jervis was right. It fell on Johnston to modernize the community platform. The result is sort of an “IdeaStorm 2.0” and it is a much more interactive site, one that looks pretty much like most online communities look these days. Among the major new functions:

  • Idea Partners brings in more Dell representatives as well as 28 corporate partners, "who represent every aspect of technology, products and innovative ideas," as well more Dell people to interact and streamline the flow of ideas from customers to the right person in Dell’s 110,000-emloyee organization so that good ideas don’t die of old age before being considered.
  • Technology.  Johnston observed that online behavior has fundamentally changed since 2007. "Social Media is now a critical component of any online platform," he said. The new IdeaStorm is built on a Salesforce.com platform so that social functionality would be state-of-the-art.
  • Storm Sessions. In a Storm Session, a Dell representative schedules a time to address a specific issue and engages users in dialogue. It is in real-time dialog, a striking contrast to the arcane focus groups of yore. Except that the participants are volunteers and usually join because they care about the project rather than need a stipend.
  • Gamification & Rock Stars. IdeaStorm rewards contributing community members with points. The top point-getters achieve “Dell Rock Star status.
  • The top 80 point scorers become designated Dell Rock Stars who will be treated as the top tier of community influencers and included in special programs and activities.

The play that most impressed me is that Dell hired Jervis, its most vocal community critic to become the new IdeaStorm community manager to focus on "bridging the customer-company gap," Johnston said.

Jervis was first retained as a consultant who brought a skeptic’s perception into the project planning. Over time, Jervis came to understand the considerable design and strategy challenges the site posed to Dell as well as users. He is entrusted to understand and communicate the respective perspectives of both company and customer.

The company is being quiet about the project so far, but site improvements have been going up for the last three months and appear to be pretty much complete. Jervis and other Dell representatives have been steadily increasing company participation and customer participation has risen each month for the last three months.

Fresh ideas have been coming in.  Over the weekend, one user suggested a mouse that could scan content directly into a computer; a device that I think would be well received in the marketplace.

The surprise for me was to realize how quickly social technology moves. In online’s previous generation, static websites often endured without change for an entire decade. Yet IdeaStorm went from a radical new concept to something in need of massive updating in less than five years.

It should serve as a lesson to large site providers to stay current and keep tweaking.  The second lesson is to just keep talking with your customers. Their collective perspective will shape your future whether you like it or not.

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