There are many reasons we love to work with clients like Dell, Inc., not the least of which is that they genuinely want to engage and listen to their brand community. It is not unusual for Dell, Inc. to launch an application like IdeaStorm to take suggestions directly from the mouths of their community members, and then make changes to their company and products based on those suggestions. The next in the lineup of community applications is Community Pulse.
Community Pulse allows anyone to submit their thoughts on Dell’s products and business. Users don’t have to register. Each post is completely anonymous, making the process as simple as possible.
For this application, 160 topics were defined to encourage discussion among users. A user can make a post by choosing one of these topics and then submitting a compliment, comment, or complaint about the topic. The tag cloud on the site then displays each topic based on its general tone (the closer to the top of the page, the more compliments), the amount of people talking about it (the bigger the font, the more posts), and how recently its been discussed (the closer to the left of the page, the more recent the last post), allowing the user (and Dell, Inc.) to view a multidimensional graphic display of what people are saying.
We also built a Google Gadget that displays the tag cloud and latest posts, and allows users to see the tone over time (the pulse) of any topic.
Community Pulse is still in Beta, so feel free to go check it out and tell us what you think by making a post on the site under the “Community Pulse” topic!