Technology can be fun. So when I wanted to try out my newest video toy yesterday at the Customer 1st Conference in Phoenix, Vida Killian from Dell volunteered to be the first to be interviewed on it.

The Customer 1st show kicked off with a full day track on social media and how it relates to the role of customer service. Vida’s presentation took us through the efforts at Dell to crowdsource ideas for new products and features using the IdeaStorm platform they created. She also touched on the other social media efforts the company has become known for. Dell is a fantastic partner of Radian6′s and we’ve enjoyed working with them on their social media journey and development of many of the industry’s best practices.

So here is a brief interview with Vida (pronounced ‘Vid-a’ not ‘Veee-da’ – I left in the first part of the video where I finally pronounced her name correctly after multiple takes – one of the few flaws in getting to know someone digitally first is you often train your brain on the mispronunciation for a long time)

She graciously shared a number of thoughts on how social media is moving beyond a single team and is now spreading into the enterprise. She also shares her industry predictions for 2010, since we are coming up on year end and I thought it would be fun to ask.

I also had a chance to speak later in the day on the reasons for companies to be answering the ‘social phone’. Hopefully I’ll be able to share some video excerpts of that preso at a later date but in the meantime here is the deck (uploaded to Slideshare).

The folks at Customers 1st put out a post last night covering the high points of the presentation which you can find here. They also captured a short video clip from the preso which you can find here.