IdeaStorm

• Weekly Recap 5-7-08

  Thu. May. 08, 2008
  by Dawn Lacallade, Idea Gal

  It has been a busy week for us around Ideastorm!  Here are a couple of the "usual" updates and a couple of new components thanks to Jervis' wonderful suggestions.

  The Usual- The happenings of the week.

  As you scroll down you will see the more detailed review of the Ideastorm contributions to the newly announced XPS 730.  Man, you guys are great designers!  In the continued pursuit of cleaning up old ideas, we updated webcams and graphics cards.  Robert_P has been joining the discussion for several weeks as the Small Business Liaison and this week he chimed in on the debate about Dell Small Business Vs Dell Home.  The past several weeks have shown us in both Dell sites as well as broadly across the blogosphere that the desire to keep XP is as hot as ever.  Dell has responded with an update on how we will continue to offer XP.  Last but probably most intriguing is the launch of Dell's newest blog last week.  Yourblog is a place where you can drive the agenda and even author blogs for Dell.  We would love to have you contribute! 

  How about some introductions to the Community team at Dell?  This week we launched the beginning phase of a bio page on the all of the usual suspects. 

  In the outside world, we have been watching a growing debate about the uses of Ideastorm like sites for various business uses for several weeks in this update.  Most recently there has been a growing list of companies getting involved in creating new platforms to host these sites and a hot debate about the merit of these companies.  

  Welcome to new users!

  The Ideastorm would like to welcome all of the 200+ new users we saw last week!  We noticed a couple of new users who jumped in head first like sa2008 who had 1 idea, 11 comments, 8 votes and jamesmoroni1 who had 3 ideas, 7 votes!  We had more than 75 new ideas last week and had several ideas that gained much momentum. 

  Gaining Momentum-  Ideas on the up and up

  Did you catch the recent news that Dell is moving away from our build to order infinite configuration model?  Ideastorm users continued to find this idea was of much concern.  I am sure no one missed the patriotic streak we had on Ideastorm last week.  It began and quickly spread to showed that patriotic colors take many forms.  We also saw an idea that shared the need for less gain some speed. 

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• Dell Customers Help Improve Packaging

  Tue. May. 06, 2008
  by Todd Dwyer, Community Liaison - Environment

  It's no secret that Dell aims to be the greenest technology company in the world. But on Earth Day last week, sites like The Consumerist, Gizmodo, and other blogs showed us that there's still more work for us to do.

  Shortly after we read those posts, we had a team on the road to Dallas to meet with the vendor that shipped this flash drive to see how we can improve the process. End result, there's some easy fixes and some longer-term issues for us to address. Here's an outline:

  • Immediate: Directive to use envelopes for small items such as these.
  • Short term: Use of smaller boxes. We have requested an optimization analysis of product volume to box size.
  • Short term: Implementation of Dell-defined volumetric metrics on void space in the package to be incorporated into our periodic vendor business reviews.

  While third party items such as these make up a very small portion of our overall shipping volume, folks here know we need to fix it. Our sincere gratitude goes out to everyone who pointed this irregularity out to us. We hope that all of you will continue to provide feedback like this on any of our green-focused Direct2Dell posts, or if you have ideas about ways we can make improvements, please share them in the Environment section on IdeaStorm.

  To do that:

  1. Go to www.ideastorm.com
  2. Login or Register
  3. Click this button near the top right corner of the site (or click this button to the right) 
  4. Enter your idea, then choose Environment from the category list, plus whatever other categories that apply.
     

  We still have a lot of work to do, but with your help we can make Dell the greenest technology company in the world.
  
  Stay tuned for more updates.

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• IdeaStorm Site Maintenance on 5/1

  Thu. May. 01, 2008
  by Kara Krautter, IdeaStorm Communication

  IdeaStorm will be unavailable starting at 6:30p.m. CST today for maintenance. The site will be offline for approximately 20 minutes. Due to the re-indexing of ideas, users may experience some issues with the search function for a few hours (7-9p.m. CST). Thanks for your patience.
  

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• The Future of Dell in Social Media

  Sun. Mar. 23, 2008
  by Lionel Menchaca, Chief Blogger

  Those of you who have followed Dell's social media journey know that we started these efforts just about two years ago at this time when Michael Dell himself asked our team to find Dell customers in the blogosphere in need of support so we could provide it to them. We've grown a fair amount since then, and I thought this might be a good time to provide a framework for what's coming next.

  Here are four main areas we will continue to focus on as a team. I'll be blogging about various aspects of each moving forward (along with other Dell bloggers) as we start to make inroads against them.

  • More Conversations - This is really about expansion, and you can expect it in two ways: more languages and more group blogs. Focusing on Direct2Dell, many of you already know that we have a few Dell blogs in Chinese, Spanish and Norwegian. There will be more languages coming soon—with Japanese most likely coming next. The other type of expansion is with group blogs. You may already be familiar with the Dell Shares Investor Relations group blog and the Cloud Computing group blog we just launched a couple of weeks ago. By the end of this week, we hope to roll out Inside IT, which will be a group blog about all hardware and software for businesses and corporations—everything from laptops to servers and storage, services, systems management and more. Several other group blogs already lined up after that.
  • Ease of Use - This also applies to things on a couple of fronts. First off, we need to make our social media tools easier to navigate and use. Part of the way we hope to get there is to drive more consistency across our social media properties—we're working on that now. The second part: we need make it easier for you to find information you're looking for. Consistency will help, but this really requires innovative thinking. An example is something we've recently introduced on the Dell Community Forum called Accepted Solutions. I'm pumped because it empowers our customers to show other Forum readers what response fixed their issue in a way that's pretty easy to spot. More on that coming soon.
  • Collaboration - This is bigger than the blog. It encompasses all of our social media properties and then some. Over the past two years, we've built some listening posts that open up lines of communication between Dell and our customers. Many times, we get feedback from customers via monitoring conversations in the blogosphere, on Direct2Dell, the Dell Community Forum or IdeaStorm before they show up in our call centers. But a pipeline for customer feedback is useless if we don't act on that information. Internal collaboration is vital to our long-term success. Without it, we simply won't be able to keep up with the volume of feedback we receive through social media every day. Most importantly though, doing it right will mean a quicker response from Dell to customers whether you're trying to fix a technical issue, or waiting for us to implement a great idea that you have shared through IdeaStorm. There's a lot to this topic... for a bit more background, take a look at Shel Israel's recent post about social software in the enterprise, which was prompted by a software-related post from Dennis Howlett.
  • Community Meets e-Commerce - In my view, all of our efforts in the social media space should empower our customers. Speaking of Dell.com specifically, it's clear that we need to do a better job of giving customers a chance to influence content on the website. I think Jeremiah Owyang's concept of the Irrelevant Corporate website is right on target here. In the past, much of Dell.com focused on mainly on e-commerce activities, while community tools resided in an isolated part of the website. In my view, there should be much tighter integration between community and e-commerce. We've taken some small steps in this direction like introducing ratings and reviews functionality in many countries. More on that in the near future.
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• More Visibility for Status Tags

  Tue. Mar. 11, 2008
  by Jackie Cooper, IdeaStorm Moderator

  Tomorrow we will add a new feature to IdeaStorm, status tag boxes. A status tag box will be given to an idea with a status, in addition to the status tag.  The status tag boxes will bring some enhancements to the way you view ideas by: providing a highly-visible indication of the idea status when scrolling through pages and greater visibility of Dell's response, without having to view the entire thread. Below is an example of what a status tag box will look like:

   

  We also will provide some stability to the community's voting by assuring that the content of the idea you promote or demote will never change (which some users have pointed out as an issue). Yes, this does mean that ideas will no longer be editable, but fear not. If you need to make a change to your idea (such as: spelling, grammar, correcting misinformation), or if you want to delete your idea, you just need to use the Report Abuse function and fill in what you need me to edit or "delete request" (yes, there will no longer be a DELETE REQUESTS category). To be clear, I will not change the concept of the idea or add content to it (the comment boxes below the idea are meant to hold any further discussion).

  If I need more information from you in regards to what you would like to change, I will email you at the email address you have on file on IdeaStorm.  As a reminder, please be sure the email address you have on file for IdeaStorm is one you check fairly often.   

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• A new status: Reviewed

  Tue. Mar. 04, 2008
  by Kara Krautter, IdeaStorm Communication

  Over the past year we've had several different status tags; kept most, gotten rid of a few. Back in November, we defined the purpose and meaning behind the tags and cleaned them up. After several months of steadily assigning tags, we've discovered that we need a new one (and a few no longer are necessary). So we discussed our options as a team and asked some of the IdeaStorm community in Storm Room what they thought. Here is what we came up with:

  When an idea is tagged "Under Review" it is sent to the business for evaluation. After that internal discussion, the idea is sometimes "In Progress" or "Implemented". But, more often, the idea does not fit into either of these categories (or any of the other status tags). When this situation happens now, the idea now will be tagged "Reviewed."

  A "Reviewed" status tag means the idea has been tagged "Under Review," sent to the business for evaluation, and reviewed. This status tag will require a response from the business that includes a summary of the review process and any outcomes of the idea discussion.
  

  In lieu of this new tag, and as an effort to simplify and minimize the number of tags, we will retire the following status tags:

  • COMING SOON
  • NOT NOW
  • NOT LIKELY

  The history of the tags will remain on the ideas and on our tag definition page. If you have any questions, feel free to ask!
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• Site Maintenance 2-28

  Thu. Feb. 28, 2008
  by Kara Krautter, IdeaStorm Communication

  This evening at 6:30 p.m. CST IdeaStorm will undergo regularly scheduled site maintenance and should be available by 7:30 p.m. CST. This maintenance will address some database updates and provide some tweaks to current functionality. 
  

   

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• Lightning Rod: XPS, The Next Generation—Hard Drive Configurations

  Mon. Feb. 18, 2008
  by Kara Krautter, IdeaStorm Communication
  As you may have noticed, the masthead of IdeaStorm has changed again.  A new lightning rod is up today, thanks to Dell's gaming desktop team. 

  The team is making decisions on what HDD configuration options to offer from the factory in our next-generation gaming desktop system. As you look at the options we have posted on Dell Community Forum, please share your thoughts on the configurations that interest you from a gaming perspective and why. The gaming desktop HDD survey will be live from Monday, February 18 to Monday, February 25.  Our gaming desktop development team will be joining the conversation on the comment threads, as necessary.

  As a reminder, the purpose of the lightning rods is to get specific feedback from the entire community about current and future Dell products and services. This feature is how we propose our own ideas on issues we are facing or decisions we are making and, hear what the community has to say about them.

  Lightning rods are intended to entice new IdeaStorm members, and produce higher participation rates in the community based on topics of interest. Defined deadlines are sometimes set to best capture the community's initial interest.  The lightning rods will always involve a specific issue for which Dell customer feedback. 

  If you're new to IdeaStorm, be sure to read about how the site works, then get yourself registered and you can start voting and commenting on ideas.

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• Michael Dell Interview from Shel Israel

  Mon. Feb. 11, 2008
  by Lionel Menchaca, Chief Blogger

  Yesterday, Shel Israel posted an extensive interview of Michael Dell focused on social media at his blog, Global Neighbourhoods. I was excited to see Shel's reaction in the post, and thought it was worth mentioning to our readers. Many customers who follow the Direct2Dell have heard me talk several times about how Michael's been a catalyst behind just about all of our initiatives in this space. This interview covers that territory and much more.

  In it, Michael talks about the origins of our Online Community Outreach team, of Direct2Dell itself, and about IdeaStorm. He also talks about how social media is impacting the company and provides his perspective on why he thinks it is so important—because they enable us to connect with (and to learn from) our customers.

  If you're interested in reading more, please check out the interview here.

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• Oh What a Year

  Sun. Feb. 10, 2008
  by Kara Krautter, IdeaStorm Communication

  As we approach the one year anniversary of IdeaStorm, it's time to take a short walk down memory lane to see where we have been and what we have done as a community.
  

  February 16, 2007: The birth of IdeaStorm. In the first 24 hours we had more than 250 members and almost 175 ideas.
  
  In less than a month, offering Linux was one of the most requested and highly voted ideas. So, we launched a survey to find out what distribution of Linux our customers wanted most.

  During the spring you continued to deliver great ideas, and we listened. From the conversations it was obvious that we should make Windows XP available again on several customer PC systems.  Then began the open source revolution, and we announced that Dell would begin to offer Ubuntu on select consumer systems in the U.S. This was just the first of many open source announcements (Linux PCs worldwide and Ubuntu on XPS M1330).

  In the summer months we had clear feedback to give our customers more options. We were excited to announce that on XPS systems, Inspiron notebooks and Dimension desktops customers could choose "no software pre-installed". In addition, for existing customer, we launched a software uninstall utility on Dimension and Inspiron systems in the U.S. Beyond functionality, we also added color and more innovative design to our consumer PCs.

  The fall brought changes on IdeaStorm itself including a blog to make communication between the moderators and the community and a new look.   Also, per your request, we made sure that Dell Financial Services customers knew how to opt-out of having their information shared with third-party marketers.

  Over the past three months we gained several new team members, launched our own forum, StormRoom, and created a plan for site and process enhancements.

  So, where to now? Over the past year the community has submitted more than 8,500 ideas and grown to almost 36,000 registered users. From this first year we have learned a lot and know there is still so much more that can be done to help make the IdeaStorm community more innovative.

  Beginning this week, several changes will be made to the IdeaStorm site based on what you, the community have suggested. As of today, just a few changes have been made to clean up the look of IdeaStorm (no text overlap and better spacing).

  Tomorrow, the graphic below will be more than just an image.  IdeaStormers will be able to click on each part to post an idea, promote recent ideas, discuss on Storm Room and see our Ideas in Action.

                               

  Stay tuned for more announcements on site changes and watch for a few surprises as we celebrate one year of IdeaStorm.  Thanks again to the entire IdeaStorm community for all your great ideas and contributions to the conversation!
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