Yesterday morning I ventured out to Social Media Breakfast VII and enjoyed some great talk about hiring in a 2.0 world. I’m going to post a bit of my thoughts around that tomorrow, but one conversation I had with a few people concerned the launch of Dell’s new YourBlog. By the time I was back in the office (which right now is my kitchen) I had pretty much forgotten about the Dell launch until I got an email from Aaron DeLucia (with the PR agency I work with and used to work for) with some great insight including:

Very smart approach of engaging their customers and the broader consumer base by making it a very open and interactive community and not dictating the types of topics that will be discussed. Great description of what they want the site to be - little bit Community + Lifehacker + ReadWriteWeb + Gamespy.

Aaron is dead on correct. It is definitely, IMHO, the only real way to launch a blog. Surely you need some editorial direction/focus, however you MUST let the conversation be driven by your community. For me it’s like a good radio talk show host…they have an outline of topics they want to discuss, but that gets thrown to the side as soon as someone calls in with a topic.

What I REALLY love about the actual YourBlog site is the following:

  • author profiles with the cool bit of AJAX when you mouse over the faces
  • the ‘personality’ and warmth to the site, even with the overuse of white space
  • the use of video is very effective thus far
  • the ability to choose your own color scheme for the header banner is another cool tool (and a not to subtle slap at Apple)
  • and of course the portal to IdeaStorm, which is really the genesis of their community

(UPDATE: John at Dell commented with some more info on the blog and how they engaged with customers, great stuff)

Notice it isn’t really about what they are talking about…yet. They are talking about what they are up to, posting helpful videos and letting the conversation of the community dictate the overall direction. This is highly important for me because I’m currently working on our own “Proverbial Opening Post” right now for the launch of our community (excited? I am!). It certainly will have a different flavor than YourBlog, simply because of our audience, but certainly the same feelings must get through to our community, to ANY community.

At the end of the day launching a blog is really about getting input from people, from your community. I don’t want to just come out and say “…our blog is about XYZ”, but instead be honest with folks and tell them that this is going to be a place for them to talk with us, about us, to us. The conversation will go from there, but it will take a bit of time to watch it grow properly.

You guys think I’m on the right track??

–Kyle Flaherty