WOMMA/Summit - Day 1: Dell & Lionel Menchaca
The Easier Path to "Getting It"
Lionel Menchaca from Dell is on stage. Lionel is a 14 year vet of Dell, and responsible for many of Dell's community efforts.
When Dell started their blog, they started with a "Credibility Deficit". Jeff Jarvis' Dell Hell post was a storm that kicked off a reality check within Dell. Jeff never intended his support issues blog post to be a lightning rod Dell support problems, but it turned out that way.
"Did you launch the blog because of Jeff?"
"No, but he was a key indicator that there were bigger problems."
While Dell is working on digging themselves out from this issue, they're not there yet. Dell lost focus on "thinking like a customer".
Example: It took 6 calls to change basic account info
Example: A gaming box launched that was supposed to be upgradeable and wasn't
People fall back on "how have we done it in the past"... which creates major problems in the connected, blogger-centric world. Dell had a major credibility problem.
To dig themselves out, Michael Dell asked why Dell wasn't connecting with Dell customers from the blogosphere. The team created a blogger outreach program, including the launch of the Dell blog. The launch plan of 3 months was altered by Michael to 3 weeks instead.
The blog had an initial spike after the July soft launch. In just a few hours, top tier bloggers were passing the word. After that initial launch, readership dropped and then continued to climbed steadily since. Now they're in 4 languages with about 1 million page views per week. 300,000 unique visitors per month, with 200-300 comments per week.
It's a successful effort, according to Lionel, because it shows that Dell actually cares. (Funny, I seem to recall that same point from Jeff Bell's Halo 3 presentation) This extends not just to the Dell blog, but also efforts like Ideastorm. There is a specific person and team dedicated to moving the ideas submitted via Ideastorm through the company - from submission to user voting to (potential) production.
* 8,000 ideas submitted
* 1 million unique visitors
* 1500 comments submitted per week
The effort for blogging and Ideastorm are highly dependent on the amount of internal support these communities have. The effort dies on the vine if there's no one to champion the concepts/ideas/issues/problems/feedback through the company.
There is an expectation that Dell will respond (even if just "we're looking into this) within 24 hours.
Great Lionel quote: "Look but don't touch is not a strategy" - during the Dell Hell blow up, a Dell spokesperson told the media that their policy was "look but don't touch"... which was exactly the wrong approach.
All customers start with customers in mind, but once the company reaches a certain point, this gets forgotten.
How do you engage the right way?
Never underestimate the value of a "sorry", or an offer with no strings attached. But sorry alone is unacceptable - you need to followup on the thing you're apologizing for.
Transparency is crucial.
Real conversations build real customer relationships.
Social media tools help establish credibility and trust on a different level.
Engaging directly with customers will become an increasingly important competitive advantage.
UPDATE: Question time!
Q1: When you say "sorry" on the blog, how does the legal department react?
A1: You can't have a blog if everything goes through legal first. That said, anything related to safety, or tech support issues that effect thousands goes through legal first. Otherwise, it goes up quickly.
Q2: To be successful, the groups in a company must be integrated. How are you integrating at Dell?
A2: Dell community team is integrated in many, many ways. It's a slow process of changing minds, dealing with "why are we having negative conversations?" question. Over time, things are change as success begets success. Once people started seeing the full version of the closed loop cycle, that's when mindsets shifted. But Dell isn't there - lots of work still to be done. Shift is happening.
Q3: For these efforts, new budgets or old?
A3: It's a fraction of the overall spend of marketing, communications. Fortunately the costs for the tools are low, and the only other costs is the community team, which is relatively small. People are the biggest part, but it's a fraction of any other efforts.