“There is a philosophy called Contextual Design, every designer at Nokia has been trained in it by the guru Karen Holtzblatt. Everybody has attended her courses and got her very expensive book signed. The idea is that you ask the users what they are doing, then design something. If you think about Apple, they don’t ask anybody. The idea of users as designers is a catastrophe!

Dell’s cloud efforts tend to be one of the company’s best kept secrets. Some vendors’ continual cloud pronouncements tend to blend into a vuvuzela-like drone, but Dell has simply gotten down to the hard work of building workable commercial cloud and hyper-scale data center solutions during the past three years… This new announcement also illustrates a substantial benefit Dell gained from its acquisition of Perot Systems last November. Along with being the leading vendor of healthcare-related IT services (a position that Dell now enjoys) Perot was a longtime player in the hosted IT services market. That experience, combined with Perot’s sizable hosting-focused data center assets, helped Dell to get a substantial jump on its rivals in leveraging Windows Azure for Platform as a Service (PaaS) offerings.

The question is, how many of these people are real activists vs, ‘slactavists’. Now, I’m defining slactavists pretty liberally here. I’m speaking about the large number of people that with the convenience of a mouse click join or subscribe and rarely, if ever, engage. They might not even follow. Really.

I’ve seen this more extreme term — slactivists – popping up more. They are the folks that join, subscribe, friend only to do little or nothing. Sure, you have permission to market to them. But can you convert them into active followers or better still, activists – people engaged in your brand.

The issue for marketers is balancing this small army out with activists. People who will activate demand, interest, and excitement. There are a couple of keys:

1. Relate to causes. At Dell we learnt this through our ReGeneration project. We gave our followers a chance to get express themselves on all things green. The key here is that the reason they join might not be the reason they move to being an activist.  You need to work hard to figure out what really motivates your communities – and then become a source of insight and information
2. Give them a platform and vehicle to get engaged. Ideastorm is our vehicle for doing this. As are our communities. But don’t understimate the ability of left-field ideas to drive engagement. We learnt this through our project with Grafiti on Facebook where thousands drew images of what green meant to them and tens of thousands voted. We achieved amazing engagement by allowing people to express themselves in a non written way – and at almost no cost to us.
3. Make everything social. Social isn’t a point strategy that can be confined to a discrete project. Everything, internal and external needs to be be made social. Transparency doesn’t just breed accountability, it also drives engagement.

Every marketing effort will need to look at drawing a line between slactavists and activists. Building the base of slactivists will be important – converting them to activists will be even more important.

The AP, we can’t thank you enough for looking our way. You see, when we showed off our good news on Wednesday afternoon, we expected we’d get a little bit of attention. But when we found your little newsy thing you do, we couldn’t help but notice something important. And that something is this: you printed our web content in your article! The web content that came from our blog! Why, isn’t that the very thing you’ve previously told nu-media bloggers they’re not supposed to do?

So, The AP, here we are. Just to be fair about this, we’ve used your very own pricing scheme to calculate how much you owe us. By looking through the link above, and comparing your post with our original letter, we’ve figured you owe us roughly $17.50 for the content you borrowed from our blog post, which, by the way, we worked very very hard to create.

That’s one way to bloster your PR budget – charge the AP for the content they use from you

Disclosure: I work for Dell…

If Dell’s cloud server lab is a candy shop for geeks, littered with components and exotic system designs, then Jimmy Pike is the Willy Wonka of servers.

Pike, a jolly man with grey hair and seemingly boundless energy, is in charge of server design at Dell’s Data Center Solutions division, which builds custom servers to meet the high-density and low-power needs of online giants like Microsoft and Facebook, as well as other "hyperscale" computing customers.

The MIX Manifesto reads as a kind of intellectual rebuttal to the leadership mindset defined by the Fortune 500. The defining challenges for management going forward, it argues, are to "mend the soul of business; unleash human capabilities; foster strategic renewal; distribute power; reshape managerial minds; and seek balance and harmony."

Today, for most of us, those noble goals and big dreams are just that. They don’t have much to do with the day-to-day realities inside most real-world organizations. But we’ve all encountered organizations, we’ve all spent time with leaders in various walks of life, who are making a difference by working differently, who are creating lasting value based on the values they bring to their work, and who are determined to share the wealth their organizations create. The folks at MIX are eager for these grassroots innovators to (ahem) throw their ideas into the mix, and, thus, individually and collectively, help shape a new and more human agenda for competition, business, and leadership.

Disclosure: I’m an advisor to the MIX, Dell is a sponsor and provides my paycheck.