Connecting With Customers Through Social Media

Impressive results re: use of Twitter, etc. with demonstrable impacts in addition to the relationship and community-building aspects:

There’s no shortage of folks who have been saying that social media is the next big thing. Dell jumped into the social media space more than three years ago. In those days, I didn't spend a lot of time thinking about the larger implications of what we were doing. Back then, it was all about connecting and responding to customers and just making social media work. After starting with a blog, we moved on to IdeaStorm, then into Twitter and Facebook. We built a Flickr page (which recently passed 1 million views) and a Dell YouTube channel to facilitate the sharing of picture and video content we produced for Direct2Dell.

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Twitter. Today it's not just Dell Outlet having success connecting with customers on Twitter. In total, Dell’s global reach on Twitter has resulted in more than $6.5 million in revenue. In fact our Brazilian and Canadian accounts are growing rapidly too – and it was Canadian tweeters who asked to make sure Dell Canada came online to Twitter. Dell Canada responded because the team heard our customers. In less than a year, @DellnoBrasil has already generated nearly $800,000 in product revenues. Similarly, @DellHomeSalesCA has surpassed $150,000 and is increasing at notable pace.

Twitter numbers and growth in Dell’s presence in other social networks is one thing, but what does this mean to our customers and for Dell’s social media strategy overall moving forward? In my mind, it boils down to a few key strategies:

• Streamline our presence in social media networks, create meaningful content for customers and continue to increase our connections with them in those places
• Focus on building a tighter integration between Dell.com, Support.Dell.com, our Dell Community sites with our presence in social networks
• Continue our focus on scaling support of social media initiatives into the Dell business units

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Update: Earlier this morning, Manish Mehta, who wrote the first blog post here at Direct2Dell, and who worked for years on both Dell.com and Support.Dell.com and now leads Dell's Social Media and Community team, recently published a guest blog post on Huffington Post with more insight on this topic. Hope you'll take a look at it and most importantly, continue to tell us how we can improve.

Tags: Social Media, Business Strategy

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