Tom Raftery’s Social Media

In case you missed it, Dell started a blog in the last couple of weeks. So what? Well, Dell has been roundly panned on the Internet for around 12 months now for not being responsive to criticism, for not listening. The term “Dell Hell” came to be coined referring to Dell’s poor customer service. Dell’s share price dropped.

Obviously people in Dell started to take notice!

The new Dell blog started quietly with a post on a Dell gaming machine (the XPS 700) – no fanfare, no press releases, just this seemingly innocuous post.

There followed a couple of more posts on Dell’s blog before the blogosphere noticed. Several prominent bloggers on spotting the blog hammered it for not linking to other blogs:

It’s a blog in content management system name only. The subtitle is “direct conversations with Dell� but this is as much a conversation as yelling at a brick wall. There is not one link there. It’s filled with promotions for Dell’s wonderfulness.

and Steve Rubel said:

They could use the blog to engage the community in a genuine conversation on the critical issues that have dogged them for years now as well as the good things they are doing

Kudos to Dell though. They demonstrated that they are listening by linking to posts critical of them, by implementing many of the suggestions made to them by the blogosphere and by publishing even the most critical (non-profane) comments made on their blog:

What the heck is this drivel? This has to be the worst attempt at a corporate blog I’ve seen in a while, it provides no information, no value and is in no way entertaining or compelling. No comments from M. Dell, no comments on things that are going on etc.

Worthless….

Dell still have a few things to iron out in their blog (permalinks for comments would be nice, as would a relevant category listing on each post and a link to this blog would be cool too!) but if they continue to be as responsive as they have been, they are in serious danger of turning their poor reputation around.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!