This is now live after a delayed launch and looks like this…

Ok, it did look like that… now it looks like this… much less impactful and could easily go un-noticed.

Today I noticed this update from Justin Kestelyn.

Update (1:49PM PT, Sept 9) - still putting the finishing touches on this after additional last-minute testing; there may be a possible short delay.

But it is September 16 and no change to Oracle.com.

I tweeted Kestelyn but no response – although he did start following me.

Oracle Listens with innovative Web approach

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.