After a great day one, and a very 'Miami' reception last night, day two kicked off with a keynote from Bob Pearson, VP of Communities and Conversations, Dell.
The Dell Hell/Turnaround story is often cited at events and this one has been no exception. Bob likes to think that Dell has just finished Chapter 1. Of course in that chapter there were some things that Dell did wrong, but they've made some significant strides to fix things.
A few key points: First, obviously, we're in the most significant period of change online.
Second, the number of conversation and data online is growing exponentially.
Third, customers want to speak with us in their language. English only reaches 1/3 of the world on a good day
Fourth, new countries have formed that are not being treated with the full respect they deserve. If you look at data, if MySpace was a country, it would be the 11th largest in the world.
Fifth, watch out for the content pushers. They want to create stuff and them dump it. People are looking for conversations and relevance.
Leaders will enter and become relevant in conversations every day in every language all around the world about their company and product.
Six, your new home page is Google. The content and experience is being driven by the customer. What are they defining about you?
Seventh, if you build it they may not come. The traffic that matters is not about you. The search action is not brands, it's broader topics.
Eighth, less than 1% of a person's time online is spent buying product. The majority of the people visiting your site are looking for something else, what are you providing them?
What were Dell's key learnings?
1. The most important thing we do is help customers with their technology problems. Dell has created blog response/support teams that go out and help customers with their problems. Only later did they launch their own blog.
2. Blogging is global, blogging multi-lingual, blogging is a community of passion, blogging is not one blog.
3. Would you rather do a focus group with 10 people or listen to 100,000 people debate ideas for a few months ad ask them questions through the process? This lead to Idea Storm. Idea Storm has generated 12,000 ideas, 120 of which are in action externally.
4. Customers are partners. Dell recently launched ReGeneration, a blog about their customers. Customers are driving it.
5. Communities are more powerful than individuals, communities want to help each other improve. Whatever we can do to empower our customers and communities, benefits everyone.
6. The online experience at work should be simulate to the experience at home. At Dell they gave all their employees complete access to the web, how many large companies do that?
7. Join your customers communities and become part of the solution. Think direct to customer Q&A. They participate in forums like Yahoo Answers.
8. You can see in real time whether or not you're relevant to the conversation. Twitter is great for this.
You begin to ask, if you are doing all of this, why do you need to use something like a press release?
9. If you are dealing with an issue, be truthful, transparent and diligent in updating your customers.
10. Your customers are people, not lines of business. Yes we know that, but what do your customers do? What does your customer do, when they're not your customer....i.e. their personal lives. How can you engage
11. Measurement requires thinking outside the box. Things like awareness and activities are easy to measure, but what really matters are conversations and communities.
