Dell Idea Storm was created to interact with passionate consumers and one look at the number of people on these sites will tell you how involved consumers can get.
The objective is to get worthy ideas from users and worthy ideas surface because other consumers promote or demote the ideas, very similar to a digg methodology. Post - Promote - Discuss. The step added to this is "See" - See the company respond to worthy ideas & what they are doing to implement them.
The herd effect necessary to promote the ideas might result in no trend setting futuristic idea actually making it to the top. Consumers are after all never great crystal ball gazers but you do get to hear their views on simple things like Dell's excessive use of plastic. What might have been thought of as a necessary packaging element might come under the scanner thanks to this idea.
Dumb mistakes of someone in the organization also surface like the printing of the logo upside down.
An open conversation with your consumers can scare the wits of most companies, and it can expose many of your silly practices as is evident from these posts, but aren't companies much better off with consumers revealing their frustrations with the product.
The problem with this approach is that the marketing team alone cannot engage the consumer in conversation. They have to get the other departments within the organization ready to change according to popular consumer appeal. (actually this is market research for free)
For eg: the movement towards Open Office got a whopping 138479 votes. Most companies would give anything to have so many engaged consumers and what does Dell do - Nothing!! A very highly debated topic and difficult to give one company stance, but you have to take one when so many people are waiting to hear it.
These are progressive steps taken by Dell to join the conversation and in fact control it at some level by bringing it under their wing. They still need to sustain this initiative by adding it to the DNA of the company. This can no longer be just a good initiative, it has to be a way of business.
P.S - If you think the engaged consumer only exists in the case of high involvement goods like electronics, Starbucks created My Starbucks Idea with a similar objective. Check out what happens when you get some coffee fanatics together in one place.
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