Here’s a story that kind of reminds me of that old country song “You Done Stomped on My Heart and Mashed That Sucker Flat.”  (Actually, I don’t think there is such a song, but nevermind.)

The nice folks at Dell launched a corporate blog called Dell One2One yesterday and by today some of the heavyweight tech bloggers had jumped on it with both feet.  Snarked Jeff Jarvis, who has been having a running feud with the company:  ”The subtitle is ‘direct conversations with Dell’ but this is as much a conversation as yelling at a brick wall. There is not one link there. It’s filled with promotions for Dell’s wonderfulness.” 

Steve Rubel chimed in with “reads like a corporate brochure” and lamented that ”Dell really failed to get the blog going the way that they could have. This was a golden opportunity for the company. They could use the blog to engage the community in a genuine conversation on the critical issues that have dogged them for years now as well as the good things they are doing. (Recent pictures of a Dell computer blowing up at a conference in Japan were recently the rage in the blogosphere and now the media.) However, they chose not to. ”  

All of this pentup vitriol, mind you, was unleashed by a single, boring, 300-word welcome post that was the blogging equivalent of “testing, one, two three…anybody out there?”

Now I’m not here to here to defend Dell products (I don’t have a strong opinion either way; I’ve had a couple of their PCs in the past and only one of them actually burst into flames).   I think Dell as a company has a lot to be proud of. Its aggressive manufacturing cost-cutting and pricing have made computers affordable for millions of Americans who otherwise wouldn’t have been able to afford one.  More than most companies, they are likely to build centers overseas and staff them with decently-paid badged-employees rather than outsourcing to slave drivers.  Michael Dell is a much nicer guy than Mr. Apple Smart Aleck.

But, all that aside, I think trashing a new blog on its first day on the basis of its first, harmless post is–how shall I put it–a rush to judgement?

All blogs need time to find the right voice and the right tone and find out just who their readers are.  Dell’s biggest mistake, in my view, is having made it a group blog instead of the single evangelist Scobleizer model. 

Sure, the blog should address some of the big guys’ concerns, like why it takes so long to get through to customer service and why Dell machines are so unrelentingly ugly from a design perspective.  And I suspect they will or people will stop reading. 

But, when a new family moves into the neighborhood, shouldn’t you give them a couple of weeks to unpack the boxes and put up drapes before you demand to know when they stopped beating their kids?