I previously blogged about the corporate websites of the top 50 companies in the Fortune 500. I wanted to see how easy these companies are making it for customers to access the most dynamic content: News.

Oracle recently announced an exciting initiative involving its corporate home page as part of a campaign called Oracle Listens in the lead up to its OpenWorld conference. The company is going to turn its home page into a listening post; unregistered visitors to the page can submit ideas, comments and suggestions. Registered visitors can submit ideas which can be voted up or down by other members in the Oracle community.

This idea is similar to the Dell Ideastorm concept, which famously led the company to introduce its first Linux based PC (as the community voted this as most popular idea suggestion). The big difference being that Oracle is using its home page.

You can find out more in this post by Justin Kestelyn in the Oracle comms team. There are corrections marked on the post and the Oracle homepage is un-changed. Obviously some glitches occurring as this was due to launch last week. There are no further updates from Justin since September 11 – I tweeted him for an update.

It’s critical that Oracle has the resources in place to make sense of the vast number of comments and ideas that it hopes to receive because messages that go un-noticed can easily undo all of the theoretical benefit with this sort of approach as the comment below demonstrates. Oracle claims that executives will be ‘directly involved’ in this process with plans to extend this into a permanent feature of Oracle’s customer interactions.

Tags: Community, Dell, Feedback, Listens, Oracle, Web