Destination Matters: Dell's Social Media & Community Journey
1. Destination Matters: Our Social Media & Community Journey Allison Dew, Executive Director, Social Media, Analytics, Community & Customer Research 2nd Annual SMaC Talk Unconference, July 26, 2011
Many of you in this room have been Dell’s explorers, getting out into the “new world” of social media, discovering rich new ways to listen, engage and act in the interest of our customers being able to do more. You have discovered new lands, mapped paths forward, and planting the Dell flag in new places for Dell and for your Business Units.Whether it was the explorers discovering the new world, the first people to explore the artic, our first woman women astronaut or someone like Amelia Earhart being the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic, breaking new ground is challenging.You have experienced hardship – from doubts about your “discoveries” to using old tools in new environments and questions about whether things in a new world are really any different than they were in the new world; as well as what are the new raw materials here that might enable us to colonize this new place and add business and customer benefit to Dell.Louise Arner Boyd (1887-1972): known as the "ice woman," was an American who repeatedly explored and photographed the Arctic Ocean; she was also the first woman to fly over the North Pole. Christopher Columbus;Sir Francis Drake: an Englishman who hoped to explore possibilities of trade and colonial settlement in the Pacific Ocean and to find the western outlet of the Northwest Passage..Amelia Earhart : First woman to fly solo across the Atlantic in 1932, set many flying and aviation speed records..Sally Kristen Ride: the first American woman in space. Frederick Cook: One hundred years ago American explorer Frederick Cook claimed to be the first man to reach the North Pole. Matthew Henson is an early African-American explorer who was said to have discovered the North Pole in 1909. Henson became the first man to successfully reach the unexplored destination.
Like those early explorers, your accomplishments have been achieved through a combination of your taking risk, your sound judgments, the use of a good telescope – all with a keen sense of focus on both the direction, the route forward, and ultimately the potential to do better for our customers. In this respect, you have been at the forefront of our brand and business transformation – renewing our customer connections, directly using the new tools of the social web and building communities that extend and deepen our relationships with customers – wherever they are in this new world. And in doing that, you too have been helping us chart a more complete path forward, opening up these new possibilities for Dell to really take new ground, delivering on our purpose, with the focus on ensuring customers have the power to do more.
You have helped find and map Dell’s path forward. We know that our discoveries over the past few years have significant potential for us and our customers. At our best, Dell has always been about enabling customer outcomes. Like the New York harbor was new immigrants and settlers, we helped our customers realize new opportunities. This wave is about giving everyone in the company the tools to do that. Pursuit of the discovery to “colonization,” or moving to embed social media and communities across the fabric of our businesses is critical if we are to realize real success and benefits from this “new world”So while the course is set, our true success will not come from just you – the explorers or early adopters discovering and mapping out our direction. Success comes with broad adoption and integration so that the harbors and settlements become busy ports of call, like this painting of the New York harbor in 1908. The social web and communities must become places that matter, as part of our business eco system. In this way the new worlds we have been discovering and beginning to settle become real centers of their own standing Christopher Columbus discovered the American shores…but if the pilgrims and Jamestown settlers had not “settled”, America would merely be a point on the map. And they did, as little settlements transformed into major harbors and cities, the settlers created places for families, for better lives; it was opportunity. The richness of America today would never have been realized if it was not for settlers, people with purpose, who determined they wanted to go somewhere, to build a place and a life that mattered to them.
Beyond harbors and landing points, these new destinations mattered because they evolved even further. Those new opportunities became new economic players. From colonies powerful metropolitan destinations emerged. Communities, cities, reached the sky. Businesses delivered virtually anything and everything in new ways to customersBut most importantly, the settlement of what was once merely a discovered outpost was transformed into a completely new landscape.This new landscape became a destination with meaning: it was opportunity; it delivered rich cultural, business, economic and life-style benefits.
Whether it is expanding services and solutions, our new colleagues from Boomi, Compellant and Perot, or our renewed focus on listening, engaging and acting on behalf of customers so they can do more – yes our mapping out and planting the flag on social media as a tool that enables us to be closer to customers – is beyond exploring. It matters. Its about building a powerful destination Its about getting to a new and stronger place for us and for us with our customers. That’s a renewed and rich opportunity and social media is one of the tools we are using to not just explore, but to settle, to get to a new place – a place with meaning and purpose, for Dell and our customers.So lets take a look at our settling and building that gets us to a new destination in a new world
Like an early settlement, we have established new policies and governance so that our social media efforts are methodical, logical and coherent and resonate across our business in a meaningful manner….When we convened the Facebook Reinvention project in October 2009, there were more than 100 Dell brand pages and scores of Dell groups. The majority of these were abandoned, redundant, off brand and/or mis-managed. We defined Dell’s Facebook strategy, guidelines, best practices and processes, bringing the total pages down to 37 organized, structured and managed communities. The core team then expanded into all social media properties, like Twitter, leveraging our social media strategy, processes and guidelines to ensure adherence to FTC and other local policies, alignment to the brand, tracking, analytics, operating efficiencies and more. The dozen people on the original global, cross-segment core team now has 39 representatives from the company all contributing to Dell’s continued effective use of social.
We have put in place arguably one of the most robust social media and community curriculums. We continue to evolve the program offerings. It is global, with unconferences like this being held in the UK, China and India last year and more planned this year.More than 15 courses are now available, and there are more in the worksAnd, again, an amazing thirst for this with more than 5,000 Dell employees taking at least one course; more than 2000 Dell certified professionals have completed 4 courses/8+ hoursThat’s commitment and I say Thank YOU!
Like the early days of the radio, we are more connected to the events and news of the day, from a customer perspective and can make that a part of our everyday routine.We have scaled Dell’s listening capabilities across the social web, just as the number of social media postings about Dell has increased to some 25,000 posts every day. Combining our central Listening Command Center with Listening within and across Business Units, we are hearing our customers every day and must move forward to integrate that feedback into our business in better ways. We are now offering tech support and customer care in more than 11 languages, and learning to rapidly adjust every time Facebook changes rules of Google launches Google+
Perhaps the strongest sign of our moving from merely exploring or settling new lands, is that we have also established the value and place for the general store in our communitiesBy delighting and connecting to customers, they are coming back for more and we are able to focus more on exactly what it is that enables them to do moreBy our work in measuring what matters, we now know that social media is a decision factor in both the consumer and b2b space; that social media is not simply about awareness or brand sentiment…it is that; but it is also about every aspect of the customer lifecycle and impacts the complete customer lifecycle….It impacts loyalty, and the amount returning customers purchase from Dell.This work is not done, but we are well on our way and we know where we are going Improves Dell’s reach and share of voice; we know there is causality between social media activity and purchase, it provides high business value and contributes to demand generation, Social media based support improves sentiment and correlates with higher revenue Engaged social media customers improve loyalty
We have and are re-engineering stronger and better infrastructures to support community building, both when it comes to the Telligent community platform, as well as the ability to sustain more activity across Ideastorm.• Telligent 5.6 launch in 7 languages… with 0 down time. First time ever in history of community! Flawless execution becomes standard operating procedure.• DellTechCenter Germany launched in Q1 to support brand launch.• Streamlined registration, significant progress towards single page registration coming q3• Finished planning and design for DellTechCenter, dev well on its way• Co-designed next generation RMS for community with Telligent. Will be delivered in Telligent 6.5 targeting Q1 FY13• New MVP programs coming for all communities in FY12 – Forums MVP launches Q3.• Ideastorm moves from surviving to thriving with:o Reversed higher Dell participation and traffic trends from 10/2010o Participation by Dell has improved 263% compared to previous sample*o Solid first-round implementation of Idea Partners Program; Program management
And beyond our “ocean going” capabilities, we are also strengthening the infrastructure, to deliver the power of social media and community right across the the Dell online eco-system, internally and externally• Dell.com continues to become more social with Facebook like buttons• Userater on Facebook integration with ratings and reviews on dell.com• Beta of corporate pages on Linked In• Power of Chatter for sharing and connecting and collaboration inside Dell
Like the early Pilgrims, we can have our own thanks giving. We have much to celebrate and be thankful for as we moved from exploration to settlement and realizing new destinations for our business and customer centricity. For example, we can proudly celebrate • 5 years of corporate blogging at Direct2Dell • The tremendous successes with Techcenter• Leading positions globally such as RenRen and Sina
From a barren and new landscape where the Pilgrims and Jamestown settlers barely eked out an existence, came more settlers who together built thriving ports of call and communities; those tiny settlements grew and eventually became “home” to whole new populations – people who had a dream and simply imagined, hoped they would have the “power to do more”Im not saying our discovery is over or that innovation wont continue…in this space nothing could be further from the truthHowever, think we can assert that we have found our way across the Ocean and we have mapped the value and direction for using social media across the fabric of Dell.We know the value of direct customer interactions and engagement using the social web…to our company, to our corporate culture, to who we are. Our direction is clear, we have a place to get to in order to build lasting communities that have value to our customers and our business. We are establishing those communities so that we can all do more.From Round Rock, we are building the New York of the social web – a destination that matters and changes much about how we live work and value customers
Every one of these people contributed in some small way to making the land discovered by Christopher Columbus, settled by the Pilgims and pioneers in Jamestown, into something more.For those early immigrants, destination was everything. Everything they had they were risking on that new destination.Our destination matters too because it is all about Dell customers getting from us the service, support, products and corporate relationship that helps them use technology to grow and thriveCultural change, evolution and opportunity: that is what creates a new Destination that matters and a place for a wave of change that had meaningful results.
We are moving forward, the course has been surveyed and the time has come to build and realize a new destination for Dell and our online customersWe know we have to embed social media across the fabric of the company; we know that listening is a key part of the course, you and hundreds more like you across the company can and must be using social media as a tool to listen, engage and act, so that we all have the power to do more, with even greater customer focus and integration across our company
…to really reach our destination and make it matter for our customers and Dell, we also know that engaging and acting requires getting the train on the tracks and rolling out of the station. We have the surveys, plotted the strategy and the tools to use. Our destinations are both reachable and achievable; they are practical; and, our destinations have important and lasting value for Dell and our customers.Our online heritage, like immigrants chasing a new opportunity, serves us well. Our heritage of direct customer connections reinforces our understanding of value of day-to-day customer centricity and connectednessSocial media is a critical tool to build a better business; transparency and value of real customer connectedness – giving us the power to do more for our customers.
The tracks are down, the train is on the track, but two other things are critical to getting to our destination and making it matter.First, each and every one us needs to be building the communities around the train tracks that foster settlement. Those communities, on or off domain, require that we use the tools we have to listen, and not just push Dell messages, but also engage and act on what we hear from customers – working together we need the various parts to come together so that we can do some real “barn raisings” that stand out and help us and our Dell neighbors build strongly.See those tool belts. Well, we are going to strengthen all the tool belts this year. That includes:• A new social media playbook for marketers. Youll hear more at lunch today but it is focused on social media as a great place to listen, engage and share…not just push messages and campaigns• A renewed focus on data extrapolation from listening to make it meaningful and actionable• Making it easier to listen and hear customers with the social radio and mobile too• Our training and certification will continue to be a focus and we will globally expand it. We are also focused on “now that I am trained, what do I do”While we have early successes in China with Sina and RenRen or Germany and Zing, or @dellcares in 11 languages, to really create and build destinations that matter we will, this year, refocus on our global efforts. While settlement may be similar around the globe, societies and real leadership demands that we bring the listen, engage and act approach to our global efforts…. how one best realizes customer centricity and connectedness may vary around the globe…but the value we at Dell place in customer connections across the Web, does not.And today, let’s all do some barn raising – across our segments, functions and BUs. You all are the pros, it’s time we brought our little outposts and settlements to life.
Because a year from now, we will not be embedding social media across the company, but going to a big Dell community barn dance, celebrating how social media and community has been embedded across our business, integrated and a part of who we are – engagement and active action based on stronger customer connections and having built communities that matter.
So, the (clue) train for those of you who have read the original premise behind the power of the social web has left the station.It’s a beautiful ride to a place that matters…for Dell, our customers and with a big thank you to all of you who ultimately have to settle, build and create the society – critical to who we are, our brand and our transformation….