Dell and the Escapist, Social Technology used efficiently

Social networks and other social technologies are on the rise within cutting edge companies around the world. The focus is to bring together employees to work more efficiently with greater production per group of employees. A good indicator of the popularity of the enterprise 2.0 revolution is the amount of companies adopting these technologies. An expert in the area, Mel Duvall writes for CioZone, a website that specialises in networking for IT leadership. In the articles, the author's found that 64% of companies in the united states of america use Web 2.0 Technologies within their enterprises. Mel continues in more detail the type of technologies, 

Those technologies (Web 2.0 Technologies) range from Web Services to blogs, wikis, social networking, podcasts, and instant messaging/ presence applications. Mel Duvall - CioZone

Mel goes on to list the percentage of respondents who say they are using or implementing Enterprise 2.0 Technologies,

• Web Services - 78%    

• Instant Messaging/Presence - 64% 

• Collective Intelligence - 60% 

• Wikis - 60% 

• RSS - 56% 

• Blogs - 53% 

• Podcasts - 53% 

• Tagging - 50% 

• Social Networking - 48% 

• P2P - 45% 

• Rich Client Technologies - 44% 

• Mashups - 42% 

• Semantic Technologies - 39% 

• 3D Web -37%

 Mel Duvall - CioZone

From the above findings we can deduce that social technologies of all types are vastly popular, with web services being the most popular. Web services are indicatively critical to a company that wants to expand its social technology presence.

To get a better look at how corporations use Social Technologies to their advantage, is to analyse a few examples according to the Wikinomics business model. That is the aspects of Peering, Being Open, Sharing and Acting Global.

Escapist Magazine is a online magazine that posts articles and videos that review games and movies, discuss social issues that are relevant to gamers/geeks, and discuss political issues that impact the audience of the magazine. The online community is kept alive by its busy forums which discuss the previously mentioned topics along with many other off-topic items. The site is made profitable from its advertisements aimed at the gamer/geek audience which flock to the site for their interesting articles.

Peering

The site's customer base, the visitors can engage in discussion facilitated by the staff of the website, or peer users. Such discussion devices are personal messages, comments, polls, all of which help bring the community into a strong discussion over the topics brought up daily. The company uses popular forum discussions and often tasks their article or video writers to target important issues with their customer base. As an example the popular desire for two of the companies most watched video reviews to get together to co-produce a video, brought together a collaborative series that was well praised on their forum.

Being Open

The magazine works with its community to let them know when new articles or video series are on their way. It keeps a close relationship with their user base, letting them know that first they are a company and need to make money. But they do not let this hamper their focus of creating active, engaging discussion in a clean and nice community, which they structure. Ranking their users highly in their priorities, it allows them to successfully use this connection to grow their customer base, and along with it their profitability.
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Sharing

Escapist has free giveaways to its customers to build interest in their events such as the EscapistExpo and their online store. In which members of the website get a discount. Such use of sharing fits perfectly with their online magazine structure.

Acting Global

The website is based in America, but most of its members are from a diversity of english speaking countries. Generally most users are from North America, Europe and Australia (source, user created survey). Thusly the magazine is acting global, as it is a website, it is available anywhere that has an internet connection.

Dell is a electronics manufacturer, specialising in producing laptops. As a company going through the expensive process of bringing products from design, through to production line, it is very important for Dell to gauge what their customers would like in a product. To better understand their customer base Dell launched Dell IdeaStorm. Idea Storm aims at collecting ideas from customers, refining them and then finally integrating them into their own designs to deliver a product that users will (hopefully) enjoy. To get an idea of the numbers behind the IdeaStorm Dell claims that: 19,766 ideas have been submitted; with over 742,210 votes submitted on them and almost 100,000 comments on these ideas, bringing together a refined total of 541 ideas implemented since the conception of the idea.

Peering

Dell produces good products through collaborating with their technical users through their social technologies.

Being Open

The entire idea of Dell's Idea Storm is to increase an open trust with its user base as they can communicate their wants and needs to the Dell developers benefiting both parties. Through their strong feed back and discussions Dell hopes to create trust with their customers.

Sharing

Dell facilitates sharing of intellectual property through their brainstorming sessions with developers and customers. Where ideas are passed back and forth on the structure of dell computing, what features Dell would like improved and how customers would like to improve them. This is quite open for a company delivering a product, and quite unique. It has certainly helped Dell foster both a relationship with technical users and increase their products growth as they are released with more features people desire.

Acting Global

Idea Storm is available to any customer of Dell products who speak english, while this may be a slight limitation, Dell products are not often sold in countries that don't speak english. Dell's global activity meet its social needs perfectly as it reaches its entire user base with the option to communicate with the developers of the products they use.

Summary

In summary of the two companies investigated, both use different means of communication with their customers to improve their product significantly. Social technology is a powerful force in regards to building relationships and trust with users.