ImpactWatch Blog

Dell, who was once an example of how not to embrace social media, has done a tremendous job at stemming the tide of the negative conversations about them on the Internet. Other than knowing that Dell was listening and participating in the conversations with success, I had not heard the story of what they had specifically done to achieve all that success. That was until a couple weeks ago at the SNCR New Communications Forum in Santa Rosa California, where Richard Binhammer of Dell joined John Cass of the SNCR for a Keynote Conversation.

Through Dell’s blog searches and participation in numerous other social media outlets, Dell discovers about 4000 posts a day in all languages. They handle that load by doing triage on the posts, deciding which ones urgently require a reply, which need to be watched, and the ones that don’t need a reply. Out of the 4000, about 200 are addressed by the tech support team that communicates with new media and about 100 have to do with corporate brand and image.

At times it can seem overwhelming for companies to consider tracking new media and social networking. In the past I’ve suggesting to start by at least listening. This is exactly what Dell did. Also, if you consider that a huge company like Dell can narrow 4000 posts a day to only 300 that they really need to focus on should give hope to anybody trying to raise their awareness of social media conversations.

The results are certainly impressive. Dell has been able to lower the number of negative posts about them from 49% to 21%. Richard suggested that may be the best they can do, however. In the past 8 months that number has not gotten any lower. It just seems that no matter what they do, 20% of the people out there just aren’t going to like Dell. An audience member suggested that this might be a great research topic for the SNCR. Does 20% equal success or are there ways that the needle can be moved even further?

One thing that Richard noted as important to the success of this initiative was that they had corporate buy-in. Michael Dell basically directed that he wanted this to happen. Sometimes in a smaller or less technical environment it can be hard to get this kind of managerial support, but it seems to be a battle worth fighting. They also rarely involve the legal department, and as such, it was critical to get people with good judgment involved.

Two other comments were particularly interesting to me. First, they pay no particular regard to influence of who they pay attention to. The program is truly about communicating with their consumers. Dell has learned first hand how a few blog posts can snowball. Second, from their interaction with social networks, Dell is aware of emerging issues and concerns two to three weeks in advance of getting a call about it from a main stream media outlet. I have no doubt that kind of awareness helps their overall PR efforts.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 6th, 2008 at 4:33 pm and is filed under Blogs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.