I get an email a day from friends and old colleagues asking what Dell is like. I’ll go on about all that in another post but one thing is for sure, Dell listens.

The degree to which participatory technologies are being used to create new listening posts is really amazing. What is also interesting is how this technology is being integrated into business processes. By combining the two, conversations that coalesce on IdeaStorm are routed into product development. And, conversations flagging tech issues in the Blogosphere reach tech support.

One of the new metrics for any communications department will be “conversation impact”. This metric will answer the basic question: “did we listen – did we do anything with the conversation?”

Jarvis gets at this in his story this week in BusinessWeek.

As a communicator and marketer, what is really exciting is seeing very talented people who would have once spent hours hammering out news releases discovering all kinds of new talents as activators of conversations and listeners. Instead of transmitting, they are participating – and it looks like they are having much more fun doing it. Which, to answer the original question, makes Dell a very fun place to be…