Okay, I’ll admit that I jumped on the "Jeff Jarvis Dell Hell" bandwagon and I was fairly critical of the incentives package that Forsyth County (not to mention North Carolina) forked over to Dell to get them to build their plant here. So I’ve watched their nascent efforts at blogging with interest and I have to say that I’m impressed.
They have multiple contributors to the blog and they are using it to deal with hot button issues like exploding batteries and fairly mundane customer service issues like the accents of their customer service reps. They’re also using video posts to good effect and from what I can tell they’re avoiding the trap of making it one big PR/marketing excercise. To me the best sign that they have the right idea is that they accept both positive and negative comments, and in fact monitor them. For instance the video post I pointed to has a comment from one user having problems loading the video and then another comment from a Dell person with a tip on how to download the video and a mention that they are trying to make the viewing process a little easier. They even responded to comments that their original blog name, one2one, was also the name of a porn site and changed the name to Direct2Dell.
I’m liking what I’m seeing.