November 27, 2008
Interview with Dell’s Bob Pearson by Jeremiah Owyang – Social Media Becomes More Important In A Recession
By: David Alston
Bob Pearson, VP Communities & Conversations had some great points in this video that I wanted to highlight here. He was interviewed by Jeremiah Owyang of Forrester who published the video in a post on his blog, Web Strategy by Jeremiah.
Highlights for me were:
1. How core is social media to Dell? It is not just something they do, Bob states, “Social Media is a part of who we are”.
2. For Dell, social media is first and foremost about customers, “Social Media is a way to communicate with our customers more effectively”
3. It is impacting product design, “using social media to integrate customer ideas into our product design” (ex: www.ideastorm.com ).
4. Where is Dell going next?
a. Bob said they just finished chapter 1 which is, “how we integrate social media within Dell”.
b. Chapter 2 for Dell is “how does social media revolutionize the business infrastructure of a company”. We will hear more from Dell about this in 2009
5. What about Social Media in a recession? Bob states, “in a recession, social media becomes more important”. Dell sees a greater adoption in this kind of economic climate. Why?
a. It is not that expensive to do
b. It gets us closer to our customers
6. Customer Support. Dell sees that customers have a tremendous amount to share with each other and that this is a huge trend online that Dell is helping to facilitate, “we see ourselves as an enabler”.
7. Why is social media so important? “The corporate web site, Dell.com, is not really our home page.”, says Bob. “The new home page is Google, or Yahoo or MSN. Wherever people go to search – THAT is the new homepage”. When you see what comes up in the first page of results, “those are the people forming the impression about your company”.
8. My favourite quote from Bob, “What we see is that the web reflects reality”.
What you say stays on google… true!
Also the point of contact between a company and the customer, usually the online or telephone customer service tech, can make or break a company if the customer has access to any online forum to post their experience. This is really more important if it was a bad experience because it can cause potential customers to turn and RUN away. When google picks it up, practicly nothing you can do after that will erase the bad publicity already generated. When it hits twitter and facebook where people network, you may see the backlash.
As an example, I have had a bad experience in the past with Dell that made me proclaim that I would never own or work on a Dell computer (I do computer repair) for anyone else due to a customer service rep. Micro$oft gets away with dirty, mean, nasty, boorish CSRs because they are the 10 ton gorilla. Just try to re-activate your copy of windows after install problems force several tries to get it right. You get a refusal from MS with the accusation that you are installing the blessed OS on multiple machines. Having an image disk to reinstall the OS becomes of paramount importance. Dell believes that a hidden partition with a copy of the iamge is all that is needed. WRONG! Just try to squeeze an image disk out of Dell customer service.
Dell is not even a 1000 pound gorilla by comparison.
As a result of the above related experience that I blogged locally, I know of several people that dumped their Dells and bought other brands, notably HPs.