While the delegates at the "Blogging For Business" seminar yesterday were discussing the need to respond to critical comments from bloggers one of the delegates mentioned Jeff Jarvis and Dell.

This is a person who criticised Dell for not honouring a callout service agreement. Only he did it on his blog and it got picked up by the blogosphere. Dell refused to respond publicly and as a result fanned a lot of criticism of the company, and arguably affected share values quite significantly. That was back in June 2005.

This sparked my interest and I decided to ferret about on the Internet to get more background detail. And in doing so I found Dell now have their own blog – One2One – check it out.

You’ll find a post about the Flaming Laptop. The interesting thing is yet again someone somewhere was expressing negative comments about the company. But this time Dell have responded and whilst there have been quite a few negative comments left about the affair there are comments that offer differing views. And what has happened is that a much more balanced picture of the situation has emerged.

Obviously Dell has learnt that the blogosphere isn’t going to go away and has decided to join the conversation.

I think this will turn out to be a classic case study of a large corporation learning how to engage with customers, fans and critics through the medium of the blog – and therefore definitely one to stick in your RSS feed reader.

Thanks for sharing that with us Coral.