[Richard Binhammer in Ottowa. Photo by Joseph Thornley]
I interviewed Richard Binhammer yesterday for my chapter on Dell Computer. My notes are posted below. These will appear in the middle of the chapter, which begins with talking about Dell's Ricardo Guerrero , who started Dell Outlet after seeing Twitter at SXSW 07. Please keep in mind that these are raw notes and will bed different when adapted to the book. Please also note that the links are put to the right of what they are linking too, because they will be printed in a book.
I hope you tell me your thoughts about what Richard said. It can very well influence what is written in the chapter:
"Ricardo brought Twitter into Dell. He made the rest of the people using social media take a look at it. He had figured out how to make money with it, but my group wasn't focused on revenue. For us, Twitter began as a blogger outreach extension. It wasn't a strategy at first although it emerged into a strategy.
Let me explain. My group was interested in using social media to engage customers. We had started a lot of blogs. They all centered around Direct2Dell [en.community.dell.com/blogs/direct2dell/default.aspx] where Lionel [twitter.com/lionelatdell] was writing about all sorts of Dell stuff, but was also serving as a conduit to other blogs like Ideastorm [www.ideastorm.com] and Dell Shares [en.community.dell.com/blogs/dell_shares].
Much of our job however, was in the other direction. It was in monitoring what was being said about us: If someone wrote 'Dell is crap, ' then there really wasn't much for us to do. We can't change attitude. "But if someone blogged that 'Dell is crap because...' and then talks about a specific problem that we might fix, then we jump in as fast as we can and try to help solve the problem.
So when we looked at Twitter, we saw a natural extension of our blog monitoring program. The conversation had moved over to Twitter, which was MICRO blogging --but still blogging. At Twitter there were tons of conversations already going on about Dell and, more than that, they were happening very, very fast. We already had a Dell Blog Response Strategy and as we got involved, Twitter just became part of our definite strategy to join the conversation and respond when we thought we could make a difference.
The first surprise we had is that Twitter turned out to be a better, much faster, way to find blogs and content about Dell, that say Google Blog Alerts [www.google.com/alerts] or Google Reader [www.google.com/reader] or other tools we use.
At first, we were just lurkers. We went there and I would get links to blogs to read and they were often very relevant to Dell, even if they didn't mention Dell. It put our hand more firmly on the pulse. Twitter became our early warning system.
After lurking for a while, we started sharing. I started my RichardatDell account, then so did Lionel. Now there are more than 100 Dell employees using Twitter as part of our job. We blog under our own names. You almost always see our real pictures there. And we tweet about ourselves. Maybe two-three times a day, I'll slip something in about Dell--but it will have to be something interesting to me about our company. This whole Twitter thing won't work if we just become shills for Dell."
What interests me and what I post, would be different than say, Matt Domsch from the CTO office
It is our strategy not to speak with one voice. A blogger who influenced me once wrote that he just can't have an intelligent conversation with a Coke Bottle. People do not wish to speak with brands. They wish to speak with people. And at any big company, different people have different passions and knowledge sets.
Twitterville is wonderful for getting the message in from these 100 people Tweeting than our getting messages out through the 21 Twitter accounts. Twitterville is great because people tell you when you screwed up as quickly and as often as they tell you when one of your representatives was wonderful.
During tough economic times, it is even more valuable. You don't need expensive focus groups anymore.Twitter is part of a social media strategy that allows us to bring customers into our company and walk down the hallways with them talking about things we share in common and very often those are Dell things."
