Dell’s social media principles at Radian6

Every month, Dell has 25,000 conversations with customers who provide feedback on products.

9,000 employees are trained in social media with an emphasis on listening and engaging with the customer. And they filter relevant data by ratings of reviews.

At the Radian6 Social2011 conference in Boston, Dell discussed its successful social media strategy and use of social media to leverage brand credibility and visibility.

Content: It’s all about storytelling

• Be authentic, engaging & informative
• Practice “purposeful edutainment”
• Recognize the fine line between slick content (bad) and highly produced, purposeful education content (good).
• Follow a code of conduct
• “Need to go from listening … to understanding … to insight.”
• Your audience doesn’t see your .com as a homepage. Instead, your homepage is Google, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, whatever platform they’re engaged with.

Dell’s social media four R model

• Review
• Respond
• Record
• Redirect

Video: Time to press ‘record’

• Video is key
• High production value is important, but so is user-generated video.
• Video creates compelling experience on the web.

Semantic analytics

• VERY smooth. What used to take scads of time and exhaustive research can now be delivered at lightning speed.
• How to know what is being said
  • Consolidate all data
  • Analyze
  • Create insights

Use Dell’s wisdom

• Fish where the fish are: Communities & support forums
• Be a storyteller: Share insightful & exciting happenings
• Be nice, have fun, connect
• Traditional tactics don’t work in social media: Long-term relationships that go way beyond campaigns, and last decades (ideally)
• Experts become our best marketers

Listen, engage, and produce a dialogue with your customer. Dell uses social media to establish lasting relationships with their customers.

What can you adapt from Dell to template your social media campaign?