Dell is going full throttle

Jeremiah Owyang (again) has a nice and short interview with Bob Pearson from Dell. After a bumpy start, Dell has really gotten their act together in social media, and now they seem to be going full throttle.

These are the main questions asked in the video:

• Is IdeaStorm really great for you selling products? Are you increasing sales?
• Is social media impacting the bottom or top line?
• Is it true that Dell has made $500.000 on selling refurbished or used equipment on Twitter?
• Is social media superficial branding, or does it truly change the company?
• A looming economic downturn is happening, will social media adoption with the firm Dell increase or decrease?
• Is it better for customers to self-support each other rather than calling Dell Support?
• When you’re thinking about your corporate website and your corporate web strategy – what comes to mind? What do you think about first?

I have picked some really good quotes from the video, but there’s more, so don’t miss to watch the video! It’s not that long.

“Social media is becoming part of who we are, in terms of the company and how we work overall.”

“In a recession social media actually becomes even more important because as we know it’s really not that expensive to do, and it also gets you closer to your customers.”

“Customers have a tremendous amount to share with each other… … we look at ourselves as enablers and facilitators, so customers can help other customers with technical solutions, they help with ideas, they help with product reviews, and that is a huge trend that we are gonna be seing more and more of around the world.”

“We wanna make sure we’re always having conversations. So we’re not dumping content. We’re actually trying to have conversations that customers care about.”

A lot of companies today even struggle to create content that is interesting to talk about. Pushing it even further and engaging in conversations shows that Dell really gets it. They don’t just give consumers “tools to play with” but actually take part in constructing something of more value. They get feedback they can act on.

“Well, actually, the corporate homepage, dell.com, that’s not really the real homepage. The homepage today is Google, or MSN or Yahoo. Where people go to search, that’s the new homepage. That’s where first impressions are found.”

This is definitely a very interesting perspective, and it rings very true to me.

It is obvious to me that Dell is really serious about this. It also tells me that the learning curve is pretty steep in the beginning. It’s not that long ago that they struggled bad with Dell Hell, but once they really put some effort to it, it seems to have paid off and now they just want more! I hope other businesses will follow Dell’s lead!