For most people in corporate communications they know about DellHell. The story of Dell making a 360 back to having a good reputation. The behind story is pretty long, here is a link to Jeff Jarvis’ archive posts talking about how Dell computers suck. The gist of the story is that Dell did not listen and were nieve to the power of blogs. Jarvis was a pretty well known blogger, and when he was gypped of his in home warranty all hell broke loose. He let whom ever was interested in reading, know how Dell Sucks and how Dell Lies. His posts about Dell have hundreds of comments agreeing in their hatred for the company. So how did Dell do it how did they gain the respect from customers again? Dell finally got it, possibly after recieving a letter from Jarvis basically saying, if Dell did not start to listen to customers, and improve customer service, they would not be loosing just one customer, but many of that customers friends. Jarvis explains that Dell needs to jump on the bandwagon and start checking the internet and blogs, to see who is talking about their company. DellHell happened back in 2006, and now Dell has improved their reputation, by creating Direct2Dell and IdeaStorm. Here is a video from Ragan Communications with an interview with Vida Killian, who manages Dells Ideastorm. The video talks about Dells blogs. Dells internal blogs, are taking over their email systems, and encourages employees to express ideas. There are focus groups in their internal blog, OneDellWay, which are team written. Michael Dell gets involved in the posts and does leave comments. One of their popular blogs is is Direct2Dell which is their external blog. Killians explains it as a way for Dell letting their audience know what is going on with Dell, which is different from their Ideastorm which is more of their customers giving ideas.
Dell’s IdeaStorm is just like My Starbucks Idea. The video below explains how people can post ideas, where comments can be posted, adding to the idea. Then ideas will be voted on and if one idea gets a lot of votes, Dell might implement the idea.
With the use of social media and actually making a change to listen to customers, Dell has gotten back in the game. They have a better reputation, but will always have DellHell reminding them to keep on track.
Alyssa – thanks for the nice post and videos of my day with Ragan! You are absolutely correct – Jeff Jarvis will always be a reminder for us at Dell to continue to listen and engage with our customers as well as find more and more innovative ways to do so. People talk about brands everyday and it only makes sense for the company or brand to join in those conversations when possible.