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 restaurant or "Mom and Pop" business has always done to succeed: maintain and strengthen relationships with customers.
If you are embarking on the use of social media as a trend or because you think it is the new media platform that can replicate what you used to do it is worth remembering that even 300 million televisions in American homes can't fully bring a brand to life. If your focus is all about scale, reach, impressions and size, then you may be missing the benefits of the emerging era of real, interactive Web connections that enable businesses to have meaningful and valued relationships with its customers and other stakeholders. Proceeding down the old route may be just as likely to inflame customers as you are to induce them.
However, if you are thinking about social media from a customer centric perspective and looking at it as a means to transform your business of today with the intimacy of the Mom and Pop shop of the old days, then you may be thinking about how to also reach this state across a large scale operation. Just as a TV - or two or three - in every home doesn't guarantee brand intimacy, neither does a computer - or two or three -- in every house and all your office desks, lap, or hand for that matter.
So as long as we remember that intimacy, sincerity and customer relationships come first when we talk about social media, lets take a look at how size matters.
When the telephone was first invented and deployed, it was only for the few. Many could not imagine its use, or ubiquity - let alone business applicability, or even reliance. Today the telephone (wired and wireless) have become ubiquitous, full-featured - voice mail, conference calls, call forwarding etc - and virtually every business employee has one or two.
At Dell, we are scaling our social media capabilities across the business much like telephones became just a part of how you do business and connect with people you need to be in touch with to do a better job. Here are some of the principles we are following:
Follow Manish Mehta on Twitter: www.twitter.com/ManishatDell
However, we do have a few issues to get over when we face 'scale.' I'm excited by how we can make this work in the future when customers and employees become a thing of the past and we are leading communities that expect individual experiences and engagement.
1. What do you think that Microsoft is doing that Dell could aspire to in order to move up the ranks?
2. How big a culture change and internal change management issue is this, and does the #1 ranking by any company mean something quite significant in culture change achievement?
3. The survey, and the press release, implied that tech-savyy companies should "of course" be high up the list (despite IBM being #49) and I would have not thought this to be true at all. I would have thought the very brand conscious consumer companies would be higher, not necessarily tech companies - do you have a view about this and any "natural performers" or is it hard work for all companies?
4. How much of a competitive advantage, in general terms, do you think companies in the top 10 have over say companies in the bottom 10 - expressed in whatever objectives you think are important?
Thanks in advance, and look forward to your future posts.
Walter Adamson @g2m
http://xeesm.com/walter
Thanks for your feedback and the great list of questions. There are quite a few rankings out there – some related to how engaged companies are with their customers or others on how social media savvy they are. Each ranking has it’s own methodology and conclusions. While we can learn from these studies, our focus is primarily about listening, learning and engaging with customers. We are excited when customer conversations provide us with insights that we can apply to our business to drive improvements and impact positive change. As a simple example, recently a customer blogged about one of the photos on Dell.com versus what the product looked like when they received the package. We took their advice and changed the picture at Dell.com because we listened to our customer.
It’s also worth noting that quite a few of our engagements with our customers start online but quickly move offline due our policies that protect customer privacy and confidential information – some of this may not have been captured in the ranking methodology. I also don’t know if the score and Netprospex database take into account each and every Dell employee that is interacting with customers across the Web, or whether it simply looks at branded properties.
continued below....
Frankly, rankings are not the core focus – what matters more is if a company is seizing the opportunity to use the Web to do more in terms of connecting with customers. That means very different things for different companies, given the difference in products, and the different kinds of topics that each company has to act upon. We have found that the Web is a great place to connect with our business-to-business customers, so I am not sure that assumptions about technology or consumer companies carry much weight. I think all kinds of people are using the Web to connect, share and communicate. Any company can take advantage of that to become more intimate with customers. The great news is that all of the companies on the list, regardless of ranking are making a sincere effort to engage with their customers through social media. From that they gain invaluable insight directly from their customers on how to make positive changes to their business in a way that just wasn’t possible before. I think that’s the key takeaway.
Thanks for dropping by and for the comment.