1. DELL-HELL – A SOCIAL MEDIA LEARNING

2. Dell Inc.
Dell Inc. is a multinational information technology corporation that develops, sells and
supports personal computers and other computer-related products. Today every Fortune 100
company does business with Dell. The company sells personal computers, servers, data
storage devices, network switches, software, and computer peripherals. Dell also sells HDTVs,
cameras, printers, MP3 players and other electronics built by other manufacturers

3. Jeff Jarvis
In July of 2005 Jeff Jarvis of Buzz Machine bought a lemon from Dell. He paid a premium for a
four year in-home service plan. Jarvis, when started facing problems with the Dell computer,
contacted Dell engineers to fix his computer. On repeated request when they refused to come
to his house and fix his computer, Jarvis got angry and started complaining about it and began
blogging. The other unhappy customers of Dell also joined Jarvis on the blogosphere. This
group of bloggers engaged in open warfare against Dell. Jarvis' widely circulated criticism had
triggered hundreds of bloggers to publicly complain about service they've received from Dell's
technical support.

4. Michael Dell
The blogosphere exposed a customer service problem that had been there all along. The
problem was not about Jarvis blogging. The problem was that Dell just didn’t care about its
customers. The impact of the collective blogging was enormous. The blog Dell-Hell by Jarvis
single handedly brought down Dell. He hurt their stock price. He hurt their reputation. The
damage was so severe that Michael Dell returned to run the company after three years. Dell
focused on improving customer service quality; Dell started engaging with the bloggers and
social media experts; and it came close to the customer and engaged them in the product
development process.

5. Campaign – IdeaStorm and StudioDell
To manage the fiasco, Dell started to address the core issues by investing an additional $150
million in their customer service operations. In 2006, Dell launched an official customer
services blog. In February 2007 Dell launched IdeaStorm and StudioDell. IdeaStorm allows Dell
users to feedback valuable insights about the company and its products and vote for those
they find most relevant. StudioDell is a place where Dell users could share videos about Dell-
related topics.

6. Dell’s social media engagement
The idea of social media networking was to address the core issue and engage the customer
rather than managing the customers. The seriousness of Dell’s social media engagement is
reflected in the chief blogger, Lionel Menchaca, statement when he says “I agree with what
Jarvis had to say: instead of trying to control information that was made public, we should
have simply corrected anything that was inaccurate. We didn't do that, and now we're paying
for it.”

7. Dell’s social media engagement
Dell Earth
The engaged customer throughout the social media world are the leading voice of computer
manufacturers in social media environments. Dell has exceptional social media presence. At
the nadir of the social media curve 49 percent of blog posts were negative, today it has come
down close to 22 percent. Direct2Dell currently ranked about 700 on Technorati, among the
highest corporate blogs; it gets more than 5 million unique views per month. IdeaStorm is
doing good and over 7000 ideas have been submitted. Studio Dell gets more than 200,000
views per month. These figures will keep changing and if Dell is engaged with its customer it
can only go better.

8. Dell’s social media engagement
Today, the Dell community has become more engaged and strong. It became customer friendly
to the extent that it started owning their mistakes. Once they also put one of its exploded
laptops on its blog to admit, yes, there is a problem and it caused by the battery manufacturer.
What can be better result than the impact? Moreover, the company has done a lot to turn its
brand around, and it is working.

9. THANKS