I’ve known about Ideastorm for some time, but admittedly have never actually visited the site. I finally did so a while back and I have to say I absolutely love it. The compelling element for me was to see that there were several real Dell employees on the site responding to customers and prospective customers. The volume on the site is significant, and I can’t imagine any other company getting the sort of honest feedback that Dell is getting on its site.

Some of it is very painful to hear, but Dell are evidently not deleting critical comments. They’ve obviously taken the decision that if someone is going to say something negative they would rather hear it, and they would rather hear it in a forum where Dell has the right of response, rather than the conversation being owned by someone else.

Starbucks have already copied the idea, I wonder how long before these are standard for most companies?

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