Posts Tagged ‘dell’

The question of ROI from ’social media’ tools or ‘Web 2.0′ style implementations is never far from any debate about the business worth of the new technology.

Twitter is a perfect example of a tool that is seeing huge uptake among both individuals and corporates but which has no obvious revenue model itself and lets its users determine how to monetize its use, should they wish.

The Industry Standard just published a piece on Twitter that reveals that PC manufacturer Dell reckons it can attribute $1 million in revenue directly to its use of the service. That is a solid enough number to change the game for many companies, I think. Will it change Twitter?

Hat tip to Neville Hobson for pointing me to this post - via Twitter!

I always enjoy reading about small businesses, especially in the UK, who improve their business and enhance their customer relations by embracing the Web. So I was pleased to read recently about a small UK company who have not only transformed their business by using social media to connect to their customers, but have been rewarded for their efforts by a Dell initiative to award small business excellence.

Wiggly Wigglers is a small, Herefordshire based company, operating out of some farm buildings, who are passionate about the gardening products they supply. They have successfully built, and are maintaining, an on-line strategy that includes regular blogging, weekly podcasting, and an active Facebook group.

By adopting social media, and placing it at the core of their marketing strategy, Wiggly Wigglers have reported that their business:

• Serves 90,000 customers worldwide and delivers its products across Europe;
• Cut its advertising budget by 80 percent when the company turned to social media over traditional advertising;
• Built its catalogue based on Wiki ideas generated on its Facebook page by experts and customers.

Congratulations to the team at Wiggly Wigglers, a brave decision to embrace the Web and communicate openly and honestly with their customers is clearly paying massive benefits (not to mention £25,000 worth of Dell products and services!).

Idil Cakim posted back in April on the Next Fifty Years blog, about how Wiggly Wigglers are doing social media the right way - Wiggly Wigglers: Gardening through Social Media - and summarises their on-line activity with a glowing reference, and a great checklist for others looking at marketing on-line:

There is a dotted line between being Heather’s podcast listener, blog reader and Wiggly Groupie on Facebook and becoming her customer. Heather is doing several things right from a social media marketing standpoint:

- She has a strong voice. It’s genuine and personable.
- She is passionate about what she writes.
- She informs and educates her customers.
- She offers applicable tips.
- She keeps in touch.
- She encourages product trials with discounts and give-aways.
- Her products have a social angle—they make the world greener.
- She welcomes new friends.

Wiggly Wigglers should be an essential case study, worth, er, studying, for any business looking at enhancing their web presence through social media. If you are considering implementing a social media strategy, making sure you can happily (and honestly) place a tick next to at least 6 of the above tips, will prove a solid foundation for your efforts.

The FT ran a piece in its Digital Business supplement (and on-line) yesterday on Lionel Menchaca, chief blogger at Dell. It’s well worth a read - although it’s not the best written article to appear in the FT - because of the unequivocal conclusion: blogging works.

As the article points out, Dell’s reputation was in the doldrums. As a large number of its customers were on-line and these same customers - and soon to be ex-customers - were vocal in their criticisms of Dell, Again, on-line.

Dell responded to charges that they were poor at listening by creating a sort of ‘chief blogger’ role and launching the Direct2Dell blog. It seems fair to say that the effect was positive in a surprisingly short space of time. Of course, the fact that the blog started at all was seen by the blogosphere as a bonus point. But the key thing is that Menchaca keeps it open and honest. As he says,

“We wouldn’t have any credibility at all if we only used the blog to publish marketing messages.”

The blog is a place that customers, ex-customers, and potential customers can air opinions, see what others are saying, and hear what’s happening at Dell, It also present a human side of Dell and makes the company seem approachable and willing to listen and to change.

In less than two years, Dell has turned its on-line reputation around. There may still be customer service issues from time to time or serious hardware faults but the blog can take a lot of the sting out of those potential PR disasters by acknowledging them and engaging with them before the gripe spreads across the internet.

And now for something completely different…
In another example of blogs driving interaction, Dennis Howlett’s guest post on Chris Brogan’s blog yesterday kicked off a debate about the terms ‘Web 2.0′ and ’social media’. The post itself was a blast of iconoclastic dyspepsia from Dennis. This was followed by a quick retort from Tim O’Reilly and then the comments started flying.

I won’t recreate the debate here - read the comments on the post for a great insight into some of the problems associated with taking these tools mainstream - but what the comments revealed was the power of an open forum for trying to define something and reach a consensus. This is what drives change.

The beauty of it is, that before you start, you don’t know who might have an opinion and who might be able to add something useful. In the enterprise space, this would be like inviting everyone in the company to every meeting just in case they had something valuable to contribute. Ideal but not practical.

(A quick aside: this happened on a smaller scale when I worked in Asia for Reuters. When I regularly visited Tokyo to present project plans and specifications for new systems, instead of the just the two or three decision makers, I would be confronted by a whole department of perhaps twenty staff filling the meeting room. The vast majority remained silent throughout the meetings.)

Opening up the debate might seem scary. You may hear things you don’t want to or which reveal things you would rather stay hidden. But, as Menchaca says in the FT piece, being open leads to credibility. I also think it improves the business culture of the company being open: it encourages a change of mind-set. Better still, of course, it lets you tap the knowledge and experience of the vast number of people your company will never normally encounter in the day-to-day running of your business.

Henry Miller, a novelist more honest than most about the links between life and fiction, prefaced Tropic of Cancer with this quotation from Emerson:

These novels will give way, by and by, to diaries or autobiographies - captivating books. If only a man knew how to choose among what he calls his experiences and how to record truth truly.

Emerson was one of the leading lights of the Transcendentalist movement in the US. Transcendentalism began as a movement of cultural protest. Perhaps the idea that defined it more than most was the belief that a person’s principles should be grounded in their inner humanity rather than formed by the imposition of external experience.

Ho hum
This meant that for many transcendentalists - Emerson and Thoreau, especially - writing became a mode of self-examination. They wrote about themselves, their interaction with nature, their beliefs, and how what they believed made them view the world.

In other words, they became full-time autobiographers. This was a huge cultural change. Biographies and autobiographies had long been the preserve of those perceived to be ‘great’ men and women. Achievers: inventors, explorers, military leaders, rulers, and saints. Here were men and women writing about themselves before they had achieved anything. Not even caring about achieving.

Sound familiar?
This was a precursor to the situation on the web now. Blogs and social networks are full of self portraits and the minutiae of daily life.

We are all autobiographers now
The increasingly ubiquitous web-based tools for publishing and information dissemination mean that there is little or no barrier to entry for anyone wishing to make their opinions, thoughts, life story, likes and dislikes, shopping list, friends, or family publicly available. And, in keeping with a widespread human trait, we tend to use these same tools to search for those like us. Even, sometimes, for those who we may like and who may like us.

What does this mean for business?
Well, I think businesses now have three options:

• to be like your customers - share their interests;
• to be liked by your customers - they always check out what’s new with you;
• to be part of your customers’ lives - they can’t imagine doing x without involving you.

If you can’t be part of one of these groups, you’re shouting down the wrong end of a loudspeaker. And that loudspeaker should be in the company museum. Along with the founder’s abacus, the Remington from the typing pool, and the last cheque you wrote for an ad in a consumer magazine.

Companies now need to write autobiographies, too. That’s how you connect. I say autobiographies rather than stories because it’s about authenticity. That’s not to say that bragging, lying, cheating, and fantasy don’t play a part in the teeming flow on show on the web. But in the end, it’s authenticity that lasts. Most people can’t maintain an inauthentic voice for long: somewhere along the line, the cracks appear and the false edifice comes tumbling down. With authenticity, there’s nowhere to go but up: mistakes are forgiven and second chances readily offered.

Some big US companies are already going down this route. There are leading CEOs blogging (at Sun, for example) and there are feedback loops (at Dell, for example) accepting and publishing negative criticism.

It’s a long-term strategy. Old-style communications execs will be sweating into their button-down Oxford collars at the thought of airing anything other than positive spin but the moment has arrived and no amount of tutting and procrastination will stop the flow of information about your company.

Is it better to join in and deal with friends or drown in a tsunami of disapproval? Or, even worse - fade away through neglect?

Start writing your autobiography now.

Dell continues to invest in it’s direct2dell blogging group, with an announcement that it has launched ‘In the Clouds‘, a blog that discusses the future of cloud computing.

Perhaps the biggest insight into how dell have adopted blogging comes from within the announcement (titled: more conversations…):

“From the beginning, the purpose of Direct2Dell has been to educate and to support our customers on a wide variety of topics that they care about. This blog has grown since those early days. And that growth has encouraged more Dell folks to want to have conversations with our customers.”

Dell’s strategy is also now including other web 2.0 channels - youtube, flickr and twitter to extend their conversation, and reach their customers in new ways.