Lionel Menchaca who is a Digital Media Manager at Dell (and blogger at Direct2Dell) told a full session at the WOMMA Summit/08 conference about the stumbles Dell had along the way to finding their sea legs in social media. He reviewed the Dell Hell/Jeff Jarvis episode (surprisingly - in a room of 400 people - only 1/3rd said they new of Dell Hell).
"We stopped thinking like a customer." It was the cumulative effect of many behaviors and incidents that revealed how entrenched they were in a status quo set of behaviors.
Michael Dell said 'why aren't we listening to voices in the blogosphere and connecting them with customer service.' They found that half of the commentary via Technorati was negative. They made a plan including the Direct2Dell blog designed to educate and serve (it was launched in July 2006). Those early months (April to July) were critical for Lionel to find his blogger voice. They are now up to 1m page views a week and are in 4 languages. He recieves 100-200 comments per week.
Dell Ideastorm
Their initial experience with the blog led to the launch of the Digg-style idea collection point. Launched in February has led to 8000 ideas to date.
How to avoid credibility deficit:
- Listen carefully - that's where Dell started. You need to know what you are going to do with the information - listening without action is not enough
- Social media tools create empowered customers
- When negative issues arise deal with them head-on and fast. (this corroborates our own experiences in digitakl crisis management this past year for our clients)
- 'Look but don't touch' is not a successful strategy. (original PR stance on the Dell Hell epsiode was to say bloggers could go to customer service if they needed help vs. reaching out to them)
- Enter the conversation
- Never underestimate the value of a sincere 'I'm sorry'.
Is it worth the risk?
The new-ish Jeff Jarvis article in Business Week (redemption story) would only have been possible through real outreach. Lionel invited Jef to a pub in Austin to talk with the Dell Digital Media team.
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