Enterprise Trial Balloon Sites Part Two: Voting
by Bill Ives
Here is an extension to the Trial Balloon Blog idea that I mentioned earlier this week. There is a lot of activity around user submission news aggregators where users also vote on the submitted items they like. Most, if not all, of you are familiar with sites like digg and Newsvine. Now, as TechCrunch reports, some big players are getting into the game. See their posts, Dell Pays Tribute to Digg with New IdeaStorm Site, Yahoo Launches Digg-Like Suggestion Site, and MSN Experimenting With Most Digg Like Service Yet. The TechCrunch reviewers like the MSN version the best as a digg like web application, “Microsoft sites currently in Beta that better embody the ethic of Digg than any of the other big players have yet.”
However the Yahoo and Dell sites are not being used for news aggregation but to get better customer feedback. Yahoo is using the digg like voting means to get better input into the Yahoo Suggestion Board where users can submit their comments to Yahoo on various products. Dell is also using the voting methods to get better customer feedback as Tech Crunch wrote their effort is, “a customer relations site called IdeaStorm. Users can submit product and feature requests, policy changes or whatever else they care to share with the Dell community. Those submissions are then voted on Digg style.”
TechCrunch mentions that there has been a call for a separate, internal IdeaStorm site for Dell employees as one of the Ideastorm suggestions. However, they question how popular this might be with Dell employees even though it was voted number two at the time of their writing. Regardless of its possible success at Dell, I think with the right audience, in the right company, focused on the right issues it could be another enterprise 2.0 addition to the trial balloon concept. These sites can get gamed as I have written about, User Submission and Voting News Sites: Reader Beware, but I think that would be less likely inside the enterprise. On the other hand, the votes should be anonymous to get decent feedback on the issues and suggestions. We are just beginning to understand the possibilities that social media can bring to the enterprise. Here is another possibility. It will likely take some pilots to get it right.
