While you're having conversations with friends and family across the dinner table this holiday season, we'll be having conversations too. Our new Social Media Listening Command Center launched last week, and it is Dell's global operational hub for monitoring and engaging with customers who post some 22,000 items every day....

Your employees are already participating in social media in their personal lives, and a good number of them have the desire and ability to listen and engage on behalf of the company. But the possible consequences of engagement gone awry are so concerning to some companies that they keep their...

Companies whose leaders have embraced the concept of open leadership to the point of posting feedback--both the good and the bad, in the form of customer reviews--have an opportunity to take social media to the next level: enabling customers to guide each other in their decisions about which...

Excitement over the possibilities of the New can lead to exuberance, and exuberance--whether rational or irrational--can result in the kind of mistakes that stifle innovation. In social media, that moment has arrived. Our exuberance over the connections we can make with customers is prompting some companies to compromise their data...

Companies are becoming more comfortable with using social media to open a dialogue with their customers, inviting feedback and product reviews. Some are even letting negative reviews remain live on their websites, and it's a bold move. But companies that embrace true open leadership -- the kind that takes both...

Many often wonder about whether social media is scalable, especially in light of the benefits social media delivers in terms of connections between businesses and their customers. In fact, as I noted here at the Huffington Post, social media is a return to what the neighborhood...

Many businesses are still grappling with this thing called social media; how to join conversations; who is responsible for social media in our organization; or what the ROI is; and, a plethora of other issues. And while we ponder these things the Internet population grows at exponential rates, especially outside...

A lot of smart people have made a lot of good predictions about what's coming in social media in 2010. When you put their thoughts together, it's clear that social media has finally transformed from a frustrating mystery to an essential tool that can and should shape every company's business...

Much of the discussion about the best use of social media focuses on the importance of listening--monitoring customer online chatter and letting customers give feedback by phone or e-mail. That's certainly a good place to start. But listening is only the beginning of a genuine partnership that the most effective...

Today's corporate leaders are struggling to figure out how to use social media to further their business strategy. At Dell, we believe this is backwards thinking. Social media isn't a means to further a corporation's strategy, it's a means to help determine it.

The "Mom and Pop" businesses in...