Erin Nelson Keynote at the Bazaarvoice Social Media Conference
Social media, over time, has become the job of everybody at Dell.
Erin Nelson keynoted the Bazaarvoice social media conference in Austin, Texas on April 28, 2009. She focused on how Dell has integrated social media into the fabric of the business and how we leverage more than two billion customer interactions we have every year. Erin shared how Dell listens, learns and communicates with those customers via social media, and how Dell is empowering its customers to share their stories via ratings and reviews, ideas and technical solutions. She also discussed how social media is measured and how other companies can invite their customers to virtually walk their hallways.
Erin's remarks follow.
Even though Dell is viewed as being pretty progressive in social media, we understand there’s still so much to be done. And so while we are doing a lot of things, we feel like this is kind
of the tip of the iceberg. We have two billion conversations every year with customers directly; through our online properties, through our sales channel, through our support channel. And the issue for us is how do you figure out how to really learn from those and take those and really start propelling the business with those conversations?
So here's an interesting approach. Let's just search for Dell computers. You get 48.3 million different places where you can go and see Dell computers. Interesting. When you actually go search for computer, or computer advice, or laptop, you start seeing that it's exponential, that there are tens and twenties and a hundred times more people that are participating in those conversations. So what was really important for us was to expand our point of view, first using online monitoring, and there are a lot of phenomenal tools that help you monitor and understand where the conversations are happening. It's not expensive. Often times these are free. You can learn so much by spending some energy really understanding where the bulk of the conversations are happening, where conversations flow to, and then figuring out where you want to insert yourself in that.
Understanding too that the first impressions of your brand in many cases now won't be something that you own, and figuring out how to go and get involved. As an example, this is what you can find on Google right now if you were to go search for Dell XPS laptop. If you search for this, Dell owns the first couple of links, which is great. The next eight aren't us. And so going and looking and saying these conversations are happening on Notebook Review or Wikipedia, or Tradekey or CNET -- these are places where potentially people are forming their opinions first before they even come to Dell, before they even know what we have to say about it. So it was really important for us to be participating where the conversations were happening.
I want to walk you through some of the key lessons that we've learned, and we're still learning a lot.
First, it overwhelmed us how much people were willing to engage in a variety of different forums. And we were quite surprised by the positive impact of a number of the communities. This so far is just in one year in the U.S. alone -- 400,000 people posting to our forums online, 45,000 customer reviews on Dell products, 15,000 solutions, this is when our customers are actually talking to one another about how to fix problems and find answers to questions.
So the numbers are incredibly strong, and there's also an amplifier effect to each one of these. So for every one of these accepted solutions, it lives in perpetuity. It's going to be seen by 100,000 people over the next two years. And so every impact that we had blew our minds, that this is millions and millions of people that are starting to have opinions shaped and their experience shaped.
So the second worry that we had was we really needed to become open to figuring out what to do with these ideas. One of the worst things that I think a company can do is to suggest we want your feedback, we want your input, and then to do nothing with it. So it was really important to us that we figure out how to transform our operation and use all this information for the benefit of our customers.
We just launched the Latitude E-Series in August of last year, and this was the first product that we literally took about five ideas, five core ideas from our customers to go shape the product development strategy. Customers told us what was important to them. And it wasn't through research, this was hundreds of thousands of people proactively telling us online what they thought was important. And we built the product around that.
What’s really impactful is that our customers can talk to one another, and it’s so empowering for them to share their knowledge and provide benefits to each other. This is a snapshot of Dell’s solutions portal. People can go on here, host questions, host issues, and they respond to one another. Often times in the tech community we find that people would rather do this than contact our support department, or contact a local representative that can fix their issue, because they really love doing this. They love talking to each other. They love helping one another. So it's a fantastic way for us not only to see where our customers are having issues and how do we go address those root issues, but also it's a great way for us to unleash the power of our customers amongst themselves.
The other thing that we realized is we had to create communities that engage both on our site and off our site. Dell.com is an incredible, powerful property. We have tens of millions of people that come visit every single month, but what we recognize was we couldn't do it all inside dell.com, because that's not where things were really happening. So we had to go create properties externally as well.
On dell.com we have community forums. We have about one and a half million members that are members. We've got a couple of thousand posts per week, and this is not just about support, but it's also about purchasing. It's about what they like about their computers. It's just a place for fans to come and talk amongst themselves.
Off dell.com, we've actually spent a lot of energy on the properties that are out there, like Yahoo! Answers, ensuring that we're engaging in conversations that people are having about us. This has actually been really, really important, because we also realize that a lot of people post things that they're unhappy with and we can reach out to them directly, solve their issues, and it's a really great opportunity be rightly recognized for always listening.
The third place is something that's called IdeaStorm. Idea Storm launched a couple of years ago, and what this is anybody can come and give us ideas, like wouldn't it be great if you guys had a computer that did this, or have you thought about this energy saving option as a way to power your computer. What people do, then, is generate ideas from the community. Then they actually rate and promote the idea.
We already have implemented in the last year 300 ideas from the community about how to operate our business. We have moved this also to Facebook, so there's a Facebook app now, and people can participate out of their Facebook profiles. But we find that this is also a great opportunity to show we listen. It's a better opportunity to learn and to realize the power of the masses is telling us things that 70,000 employees may not be thinking about.
Transparency and authenticity have been really, really important. I remember debating a ratings and reviews process internally for quite awhile, around how we're going to take this risk. It seemed so big. What if we're wrong? What we realized was really important was being authentic and showing people we want to expose warts and all, and that we believe what our customers are telling us about our products. Now, are there some products that get reviewed poorly? You bet. And what do we do? We learn from them. Sometimes we actually take them offline, take them out of the store. We adapt what the issues are and we fix the root issues. But most of what we found was our products were rated really well because we build great products.
There were a couple of other times when it was important for us to be very authentic and accountable as well. We had loads of anti-Dell fans, and instead of going and defending and talking about all the reasons that these were not issues, what we said is we blew it. You're right.
We actually spent some very, very serious time and energy going and making sure people recognized we got it. We hear you. We were wrong. And that was really important, because if people don't think you're telling the truth, they're not going to listen to you.
Social media, over time, has become the job of everybody at Dell. It started out as a very small core team of people and these folks -- there were about a dozen of them. They were our chief bloggers. They were the chief managers of everything that was going on. And what we realized over time was it's only really valuable when it's embedded in the business. So when people in our product group or service and support or strategy are engaging in the dialogue, they're learning, but they're also providing value out.
Providing blogging rights to thousands of people and not being able to manage what they said every day was really nerve-wracking, because again, we thought what if we blow it? What if they do it wrong?
But what we found again and again is that it’s the right decision because folks take it very seriously that they're the mouthpiece for Dell. They take it very seriously that this is a big, important piece of the Dell brand. And overall, our customers have really responded well to the fact that so many different people engage on a variety of topics.
Figuring out whether or not this delivers value is also critical. This is something that I think everybody feels like it’s the right thing to do, but what's also important for us at Dell is to think about resource and budget allocations. We want to know we're investing in the areas that are important.
What we realized around social media at Dell is the activity is important and good. We believe it's the right thing. But if we really start to look at what it's producing in terms of metrics, it validates for us that it's the right thing, that sentiment does change, that people participate that we implement more ideas.
Social media for us has also been very valuable when we use it to address specific business needs. The best example that we've got on this is the way that we utilize Twitter. So we have a business called The Dell Outlet that sells refurbished and returned systems. We use Twitter as our key sales engine, and so these are our sales people. We actually have sold a million dollars in merchandise off of Twitter in just the last several months. We have 700,000 followers just on this one account.
We have now 35 official Dell accounts. There are accounts for consumers, for small business, for the public business sector, that are constantly talking about things that are important for people in the sales process to know.
The other thing that we found that's been really powerful is engaging with our customers on things that they hear about and on things that make their business better. An example of this is in the small- to medium-business space. This is an example of putting together an app around how businesses can use social media for their benefit. So this is for our small and medium business customers that have got their own businesses; dog food or computer services, or retail, or whatever. This has about 400,000 followers. And we're sharing with them, helping them engage around how to use this tool to make their businesses better.
I think the amount of opportunities that are out there are endless. For us, it's going to continue to be about picking the five areas that matter, because they've got scale and impact. It's going to be figuring out how to be authentic and be real and insert the right people into the conversations that are happening across our enterprise. It's going to be figuring out how to measure effectively so that we continue to pour the resources into the things that have the greatest feedback and the greatest impact, and that we test and try and are okay to walk away from things that don't have an impact that we wanted.
So we view this as the first two years of what's hopefully going to be another 20 of rapid innovation and rapid engagement in this. And we're looking forward to learning from a lot of folks here, because one of the things that we recognize is we certainly don't have all the answers.
I wanted to close with just giving you the coordinates for a few of the areas that we are most excited about and that we really see as being the most impactful. So the dell.com community, Facebook, Dell social media, IdeaStorm, and then Dell/Twitter are the areas where we have massive amounts of our traffic and a pretty high level of concentration of the conversations that are happening.
END
Editor's note: This transcript may have been edited for length and clarity. Due to varying sound quality and issues in translation/transcription, the information in this transcript may contain inaccuracies.
Erin's remarks follow.
Even though Dell is viewed as being pretty progressive in social media, we understand there’s still so much to be done. And so while we are doing a lot of things, we feel like this is kind
of the tip of the iceberg. We have two billion conversations every year with customers directly; through our online properties, through our sales channel, through our support channel. And the issue for us is how do you figure out how to really learn from those and take those and really start propelling the business with those conversations? You can choose to be a part of them or not. The best companies are a part of them, and the best companies learn from them and take the lessons learned into their business. So two years ago we started on this journey, and we had a few core objectives.
The first was how do we use social media to drive an understanding of our business, to drive a passion in our customer base, to drive new acquisition and new customers?
The second was for us to listen and to learn and to engage. And so like I said, these conversations were happening without us participating. What we wanted to do was to get into the conversation and have our voice heard.
And then the third thing was we set a target to rapidly innovate, because the thing that's really cool about the Web and about social media -- if you screw up, you can fix it pretty quickly. And so since things move so fast, we were more prone to be willing to take risks and make mistakes, because you can easily undo them.
So where we started a couple years ago was first figuring out where all these conversations were happening, and which ones were the right ones to monitor and be a part of and influence. There are infinite communities out there, and understanding which ones are the most influential, the most highly trafficked, and the ones that you can actually participate in most effectively is key.
So here's an interesting approach. Let's just search for Dell computers. You get 48.3 million different places where you can go and see Dell computers. Interesting. When you actually go search for computer, or computer advice, or laptop, you start seeing that it's exponential, that there are tens and twenties and a hundred times more people that are participating in those conversations. So what was really important for us was to expand our point of view, first using online monitoring, and there are a lot of phenomenal tools that help you monitor and understand where the conversations are happening. It's not expensive. Often times these are free. You can learn so much by spending some energy really understanding where the bulk of the conversations are happening, where conversations flow to, and then figuring out where you want to insert yourself in that.
Understanding too that the first impressions of your brand in many cases now won't be something that you own, and figuring out how to go and get involved. As an example, this is what you can find on Google right now if you were to go search for Dell XPS laptop. If you search for this, Dell owns the first couple of links, which is great. The next eight aren't us. And so going and looking and saying these conversations are happening on Notebook Review or Wikipedia, or Tradekey or CNET -- these are places where potentially people are forming their opinions first before they even come to Dell, before they even know what we have to say about it. So it was really important for us to be participating where the conversations were happening.
I want to walk you through some of the key lessons that we've learned, and we're still learning a lot.
First, it overwhelmed us how much people were willing to engage in a variety of different forums. And we were quite surprised by the positive impact of a number of the communities. This so far is just in one year in the U.S. alone -- 400,000 people posting to our forums online, 45,000 customer reviews on Dell products, 15,000 solutions, this is when our customers are actually talking to one another about how to fix problems and find answers to questions.
So the numbers are incredibly strong, and there's also an amplifier effect to each one of these. So for every one of these accepted solutions, it lives in perpetuity. It's going to be seen by 100,000 people over the next two years. And so every impact that we had blew our minds, that this is millions and millions of people that are starting to have opinions shaped and their experience shaped.
So the second worry that we had was we really needed to become open to figuring out what to do with these ideas. One of the worst things that I think a company can do is to suggest we want your feedback, we want your input, and then to do nothing with it. So it was really important to us that we figure out how to transform our operation and use all this information for the benefit of our customers.
We just launched the Latitude E-Series in August of last year, and this was the first product that we literally took about five ideas, five core ideas from our customers to go shape the product development strategy. Customers told us what was important to them. And it wasn't through research, this was hundreds of thousands of people proactively telling us online what they thought was important. And we built the product around that.
What’s really impactful is that our customers can talk to one another, and it’s so empowering for them to share their knowledge and provide benefits to each other. This is a snapshot of Dell’s solutions portal. People can go on here, host questions, host issues, and they respond to one another. Often times in the tech community we find that people would rather do this than contact our support department, or contact a local representative that can fix their issue, because they really love doing this. They love talking to each other. They love helping one another. So it's a fantastic way for us not only to see where our customers are having issues and how do we go address those root issues, but also it's a great way for us to unleash the power of our customers amongst themselves.
The other thing that we realized is we had to create communities that engage both on our site and off our site. Dell.com is an incredible, powerful property. We have tens of millions of people that come visit every single month, but what we recognize was we couldn't do it all inside dell.com, because that's not where things were really happening. So we had to go create properties externally as well.
On dell.com we have community forums. We have about one and a half million members that are members. We've got a couple of thousand posts per week, and this is not just about support, but it's also about purchasing. It's about what they like about their computers. It's just a place for fans to come and talk amongst themselves.
Off dell.com, we've actually spent a lot of energy on the properties that are out there, like Yahoo! Answers, ensuring that we're engaging in conversations that people are having about us. This has actually been really, really important, because we also realize that a lot of people post things that they're unhappy with and we can reach out to them directly, solve their issues, and it's a really great opportunity be rightly recognized for always listening.
The third place is something that's called IdeaStorm. Idea Storm launched a couple of years ago, and what this is anybody can come and give us ideas, like wouldn't it be great if you guys had a computer that did this, or have you thought about this energy saving option as a way to power your computer. What people do, then, is generate ideas from the community. Then they actually rate and promote the idea.
We already have implemented in the last year 300 ideas from the community about how to operate our business. We have moved this also to Facebook, so there's a Facebook app now, and people can participate out of their Facebook profiles. But we find that this is also a great opportunity to show we listen. It's a better opportunity to learn and to realize the power of the masses is telling us things that 70,000 employees may not be thinking about.
Transparency and authenticity have been really, really important. I remember debating a ratings and reviews process internally for quite awhile, around how we're going to take this risk. It seemed so big. What if we're wrong? What we realized was really important was being authentic and showing people we want to expose warts and all, and that we believe what our customers are telling us about our products. Now, are there some products that get reviewed poorly? You bet. And what do we do? We learn from them. Sometimes we actually take them offline, take them out of the store. We adapt what the issues are and we fix the root issues. But most of what we found was our products were rated really well because we build great products.
There were a couple of other times when it was important for us to be very authentic and accountable as well. We had loads of anti-Dell fans, and instead of going and defending and talking about all the reasons that these were not issues, what we said is we blew it. You're right.
We actually spent some very, very serious time and energy going and making sure people recognized we got it. We hear you. We were wrong. And that was really important, because if people don't think you're telling the truth, they're not going to listen to you.
Social media, over time, has become the job of everybody at Dell. It started out as a very small core team of people and these folks -- there were about a dozen of them. They were our chief bloggers. They were the chief managers of everything that was going on. And what we realized over time was it's only really valuable when it's embedded in the business. So when people in our product group or service and support or strategy are engaging in the dialogue, they're learning, but they're also providing value out.
Providing blogging rights to thousands of people and not being able to manage what they said every day was really nerve-wracking, because again, we thought what if we blow it? What if they do it wrong?
But what we found again and again is that it’s the right decision because folks take it very seriously that they're the mouthpiece for Dell. They take it very seriously that this is a big, important piece of the Dell brand. And overall, our customers have really responded well to the fact that so many different people engage on a variety of topics.
Figuring out whether or not this delivers value is also critical. This is something that I think everybody feels like it’s the right thing to do, but what's also important for us at Dell is to think about resource and budget allocations. We want to know we're investing in the areas that are important.
What we realized around social media at Dell is the activity is important and good. We believe it's the right thing. But if we really start to look at what it's producing in terms of metrics, it validates for us that it's the right thing, that sentiment does change, that people participate that we implement more ideas.
Social media for us has also been very valuable when we use it to address specific business needs. The best example that we've got on this is the way that we utilize Twitter. So we have a business called The Dell Outlet that sells refurbished and returned systems. We use Twitter as our key sales engine, and so these are our sales people. We actually have sold a million dollars in merchandise off of Twitter in just the last several months. We have 700,000 followers just on this one account.
We have now 35 official Dell accounts. There are accounts for consumers, for small business, for the public business sector, that are constantly talking about things that are important for people in the sales process to know.
The other thing that we found that's been really powerful is engaging with our customers on things that they hear about and on things that make their business better. An example of this is in the small- to medium-business space. This is an example of putting together an app around how businesses can use social media for their benefit. So this is for our small and medium business customers that have got their own businesses; dog food or computer services, or retail, or whatever. This has about 400,000 followers. And we're sharing with them, helping them engage around how to use this tool to make their businesses better.
I think the amount of opportunities that are out there are endless. For us, it's going to continue to be about picking the five areas that matter, because they've got scale and impact. It's going to be figuring out how to be authentic and be real and insert the right people into the conversations that are happening across our enterprise. It's going to be figuring out how to measure effectively so that we continue to pour the resources into the things that have the greatest feedback and the greatest impact, and that we test and try and are okay to walk away from things that don't have an impact that we wanted.
So we view this as the first two years of what's hopefully going to be another 20 of rapid innovation and rapid engagement in this. And we're looking forward to learning from a lot of folks here, because one of the things that we recognize is we certainly don't have all the answers.
I wanted to close with just giving you the coordinates for a few of the areas that we are most excited about and that we really see as being the most impactful. So the dell.com community, Facebook, Dell social media, IdeaStorm, and then Dell/Twitter are the areas where we have massive amounts of our traffic and a pretty high level of concentration of the conversations that are happening.
END
Editor's note: This transcript may have been edited for length and clarity. Due to varying sound quality and issues in translation/transcription, the information in this transcript may contain inaccuracies.
