Inbound Marketing, Richard@Dell and Social Media
Posted by Andy Xhignesse on Wed, Nov 10, 2010 @ 07:48 AM
Dell's Richard Binhammer Offers Insight on Social Media to an Ottawa Audience
Yesterday evening Third Tuesday Ottawa, a meetup group for marketing, communications and social media in Ottawa enthusiasts, presented its first meetup of the year to an enthusiastic group in Downtown Ottawa, and who wouldn't be enthusiastic about hearing some words from Richard@Dell. Richard Binhammer is one of the original Dell social media team, and as he explained last evening, he used to make his presentations on the 'Dell hell' experience of those early days, fortunately those days are gone and have ushered in what is now recognized as one of the most successful deployments of social media by any company...in the world! After being introduced, Richard crowdsourced the audience asking if we wanted the prepared powerpoint presentation or what he'd sort of chicken scratched on the plane, what would you have picked? The crowd was in the mood for chicken! So what did we learn? Lot's is the short answer, but here are a few of the more important points he made, at least in our opinion.
First off, social media is a tool. Like any tool it needs to be used for the right job, you don't try to paint your walls with a hammer right? What is social media used for at Dell? Pretty much everything from product design and development, product purchase, human resources and ongoing customer support. At Dell, there are few if any aspects of the business that don't employ social media in some form or another. Did Dell's use of social media start out that way? Absolutely not. You have to learn how to use a tool.
That would be a second point. For anyone who has picked up an axe to split a piece of wood for the fireplace, you know that those first few attempts didn't exactly produce the desired results. (Well at least for most of us!) You practice with a tool before you consider yourself adept at its use right? It's the same in this case, you shouldn't expect that your first social media efforts are going to be home runs, in fact you're probably going to strike out and maybe more than once. Maybe you should stop right?
Although the Dell Hell of the early days of it's social media engagement could have derailed their whole project it didn't. Now, Dell had a booster within the organization named Michael Dell...this helped a lot. As Richard put it, when the head of your company wants to move forward with an initiative, well, it tends to move forward. Dell kept moving forward with their initiative, eventually defining policies, training and other support actions for their program. Now it's part of the ingrained corporate culture.
Another key point was that social media doesn't operate in a vaccuum. At IME we've said that social media is just one of seven inbound marketing elements before, and Richard echoed this wisdom. As we said earlier, social media touches virtually all aspects of the Dell business, and Richard also offered that it has impacts all the way through the customer development funnel. The key is that you must begin your process with a social media strategy that allows you to build your social media presence in a manner that your company can build on. Start with all social media platforms? No. Start small and build as needed to support the goals and objectives you've created and add on new engagements that can be integrated into your overall business plan.
There was a great deal of other valuable information and Richard assured us that he'll create a link to the PPT presentation (that we didn't see) that we'll post as well, but back to social media being a tool. Tools have a purpose, hammers bang nails, chisels chink wood, paint brushes paint, etc. What does social media do? We think this is pretty much a quote and so we'll use quotation marks, "Social media is a tool that can be used by everyone in a company to do better business." And so we ask...Are you ready to start doing better business using social media? Your call.
We're at the edge of the future!
Get some help now to determine how your company might best use social media to do better business!