November 2008 - Direct2Dell

I recently published a post about registration coming to blogs, since it was functionality we never had when we launched the blog in July 2006. Today, we’re taking that a step further to allow tighter integration between community and Dell.com.

For a lot of big companies, the web is about e-commerce. Today, even though more companies are engaging customers through social media, community tends to be on one side, while e-commerce is on the other. Lots of folks within Dell don’t think it should be that way… and that’s one of the reasons why I’ve been a big proponent of Jeremiah Owyang’s concept of the Irrelevant Corporate Website.

Feedback from the community like this idea from IdeaStorm user winoffice makes it pretty clear: people hate maintaining multiple logins. That’s a core reason why we’re implementing something called single sign on. At its core, it’s a pretty simple thing: your Dell.com account and your Dell Community account become one. This linkage means you can navigate seamlessly between Dell.com and the Dell community site.

Right now, single sign on applies to content on the new Dell Community site (blogs, forums, wikis, groups and galleries) and Dell.com. It’s also worth noting that both IdeaStorm and OpenID integration is on the roadmap.

So, here’s how the process works: if you have an existing My Account for Dell.com and an existing community account, you’ll need to associate them together. If you only have one or neither, don’t worry. The process should be pretty easy and take less than a minute.

Update: Community member PudgyOne recently let me know that some customers were using their e-mail address as their community user name. Please do not do this. Please choose a unique user name that is different from your e-mail address. This is important because whatever you choose as your user name will be viewable to the public. This also means that you may be susceptible to spam.

 Note: While we are introducing the technology to Dell's website, there will be about a four to six hour window where customers cannot create a new account. Click on the image below to see a larger version of the image.

Once your accounts are associated, you’re good to go and will use your e-mail address to login into community from now on. Your user name will be displayed when you post or comment anywhere on the Dell Community.

For more details, take a look at this wiki article. If you have questions or issues with the process, please let me know in the comments section.

A recent post on the Consumerist pointed to an address to send feedback to Michael Dell, and after I left a comment there (providing a better method for giving us feedback and getting issues resolved) I began to think about how Dell’s efforts in social media have changed since we began.  I was pleasantly surprised by some of the comments there- but I’ll get back to that in a bit.

 If you’ve been reading Direct2Dell for a long time you might already be familiar with the blog outreach program that we started in April 2006. The idea was to take customer support into a realm that it hadn’t been before: proactively contacting people online, in the blogs and forums where they were talking, and work with them on their own blogs rather than wait for them to come to Dell. The early days were filled with learning what did and didn’t work, and soon after the Online Community Outreach (aka Dell Customer Advocates) team was born.

Since the time of John’s post, the team has grown and evolved in ways that I think surprised all of us that were involved in the early days.  One of the first transitions was combining the outreach team in with the team of Dell Community Forum moderators to pool their talents for community in general, given the team’s similar objectives.

Combining the teams was a precursor to what we’re trying to do with the new Dell community. Instead of separate groups that are tenuously tied together, we’ve combined the different pieces (blogs, forums, wikis, etc.) together with a goal of providing a seamless experience for our customers. By unifying the groups that work directly with people online, regardless of where the conversations happen, the hope is that we can more quickly and completely support our customers and bring them into conversations or present the information that is most relevant to them. Obviously we still have a ways to go on that front, but we remain focused on reaching that goal.

Getting back to the Consumerist post- what really grabbed my attention was the number of positive comments that appeared. In the beginning of the blog outreach team our efforts were focused on negative experiences and so the commentary we saw most often about Dell was also overwhelmingly negative. Seeing the positive commentary made me think that perhaps, as an entire company, we are beginning to move in the right direction again. Not all of the comments were positive, but we know that we still have more work ahead of us.

We’re still listening, and we’re still out there looking for ways we can help. These days, our monitoring tools are much more sophisticated.  And while I think our team has come a long way since those early days, there’s no substitute for employees who focus on helping customers and connecting them with useful information.

First and most importantly, I would like to thank you for your patience and ideas. You have provided feedback and suggestions since we went live with our new community site, last Friday. You have always been helpful in creating a better community with us, and this past week was no different.   We know the site isn’t perfect, and with your feedback we are working hard and as fast as possible to fix any known bugs and enhancements.

With your feedback, we made some changes to the site this evening:

·       Old Forum Live for one more week: Many of you shared with us that you did feel you had enough time to get back into the old forum to grab your PMs and avatars, therefore we have left the old forum at http//old.dellcommunity.com live for one more week.

·       Speed and error messages: We made some changes to the data architecture, created more indexes and tuned queries

·       “Suggest an Idea” button and link under a user’s control panel took users to a non-working page. It now points you to IdeaStorm

·       Number of blog comments and forum threads that show per page now increased to 15 posts per page

·       Verbiage on "no posts in forum" message was misspelled and is now correct

·       Verified solutions outline is no longer cut off on one side

·       Corrected signatures for forum posts

·       Corrected the wrapping of the forums post footer

·       Paragraph separation added to create forum post page

·       Friend activity in user control panel is now correctly counted

·       Added "Change Password" to password login field

We are still working on more enhancements . Thank you for your help and support . Keep the feedback coming.

A bit earlier today, Jay Pinkert blogged about the Mini 12 being available online. It's available in either black or white for a starting price point of $549.

More details about the Mini 12 on Dell.com here... and you can take a look at more pictures of the Mini 12 on Dell's Official Flickr page.

If you've been following Direct2Dell recently, you probably knew that there were some changes coming. Recently, we've shared information about Blogs & Registration, Groups & Galleries, Forums & Wikis and RSS feeds.

All that said, we're finally here with the new Dell Community site-a place where all blogs, forums, wikis and galleries will coexist. Our hope is that this level of integration will connect you with people and information that will help as quickly and efficiently as possible-whether you are looking for support, keep up with the latest news from Dell or researching what kind of computer you need to buy.

If you already have a Dell Community Forum account, sign in. If not, take just a minute to create a new account. From there, you can comment, create ypur personal profile, add friends, have private conversations with other members and more.

Teams of people have worked to get us to this point. Still, we know it's not going to be perfect. We look forward to hearing what you like about the new Dell Community site and most importantly, about the things you'd like to see us improve.

Update: I know there are questions out there. We've set up an area for you in the Popular Topics section. Take a look at some of the discussions going on in that forum and  or see several "how to" wiki tutorials.