Mark Relph talks to Will Pate, Jordan Banks, and Lionel Menchacha about How To Build a Community

• “Community means different things to different people — what does community to you or organization?”
  • LM: Communities can be formed around similar interests or common goals.  We look at things in terms of our customer base.  We use things like blogs ad ideastorm to build that sense of community — and give people a reason to work with and interact with Dell.
  • WP: Communities mean I can go to a conference and talk to people and do so without a badge for most of it! (laughter).  Community is those who engage with you. RE: CommandN –what it means is stories that are fed to me and Amber every day and commenting and evangelizing for us.  We all have day jobs, so we rely on our fans to do that for us.
  • JB: Community means people who have my back.  Who have my interests in mind — who want good things for me and are willing to make it happen.  Its not a very different online than off.  We think of community as people with like passions and desires who get together.  We never lose sight of who our bosses are, and they are people who use the site.
• “What about awesomeness?”
  • WP: People are attracted to things that are awesome — people will get passionate about it and get attracted to it.  That’s my theory.
• “What has been the implications does community have for your business?”
  • LM: Before we launched our community initiatives, our focus was on launching things and focusing things on how great Dell was.  It was a change where we became more customer centric — the blog and ideastorm is what its all about.  Ideastorm was launched 4 months ago, and its the combination of Digg and a messageboard.  Anyone can login and submit an idea about how we can make things better.  The voting helps decide which ideas are popular.  If we launched this tool it wasn’t going to work, and that’s why action is important.
• “Has there been an internal fight around transparency?”
  • LM: At Dell its not something we had.  Michael Dell himself has been passionate about it, and he was behind launching Ideastorm right away.  Different heads of businesses need to be aware of what’s coming through to Ideastorm and they are.
• “What about taking feedbacking and using it?”
  • JB: Its hard to hide on the Internet.  The biggest successes involve listening to the community.  The challenge involves trying to listen to disparate opinions.  The best thing to do is to acknowledge that they’ve been heard, if not acted upon, and the reasons behind it.  We fail probably more than we succeed — but at least we try and that’s important.
• “How do you *do* it?”
  • WP: A lot of companies go in and try and expect something magical to grow; figure out where your passionate users are.  They might be on blogs, facebook, or wherever.  Its important to listen to what the rules of engagement and rules of the game — listen first.  Then ask questions.
• “Is it important to own these things?”
  • WP: Its always good to have someone pushing it — like an evangelist.  Community success is probably defined about what people internally say as well.  You don’t have to be perfect — but you do have to be honest.
  • JB: At the heart of the community is passion.  And its easy to figure out what those favourites are.  Its easy to think of community as a vertical function — we tried to do that and we weren’t good with that.  Rather than having community as a vertical silent function, we now run it horizontally along the entire company, through different departments.