Social Media @ UBS – Social Media Monitoring outsourced to Accenture to hedge reputational risk

UBS, global financial services provider started using the social media and social data to manage reputation risks since 2010 when the company deployed Jive Software, but the initial intention of monitoring is to provide customer service on social networking sites. Later UBS started combining social data and other media reports like news reports with internal data to identify reputation risks and garner insights to assess its risk exposure before doing business with clients. UBS understands the importance of reputational and professional risks in the financial industry as any damage to these risks will have a significant effect on the bank’s business. Social Media mentions, posts, comments and updates by customers and people posted on social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, etc. have a significant effect on the firm’s brand reputation. According to Accenture Case Study titled “Keeping Track: Social Media Monitoring UBS”, “Swiss banking giant UBS is using social media monitoring as an integral component of its communication strategy. The bank wants to get a good snapshot of its public image and identify what type of issues are gaining importance in the banking industry. “First, we want to listen carefully to, and meticulously evaluate, what customers are saying about us and what they expect,” says Michael Willi, Chief Communication Officer at UBS. “If we succeed, we can use social media to better address the different target groups.” Customers are actively engaging on the various social networking sites and are posting both negative and positive comments on social networking sites and financial services firms have to monitor and respond to them or else there will be significant effect on the firm’s brand reputation in the highly competitive financial services industry.

UBS has outsourced its social media monitoring to Accenture which helps them to effectively monitor activity on social media platforms and identify the posts, comments and tweets that could affect its brand and reputation, and respond or countermeasure them fast and efficiently there by reducing the damage. Accenture employees at the Delivery Center Warsaw study comments made on German, Spanish and Portuguese social media sites located in central and southern Europe and Latin America. The Delivery Center in Mumbai, India, processes postings made in Western Europe, North America and Asia-Pacific (Source: “Keeping Track: Social Media Monitoring UBS”). Accenture tracks and monitors comments in social media in English, German, Spanish and Portuguese. Accenture delivers detailed reports on a regular (daily, weekly or ad hoc) basis and these reports are based on the tracking results and additional analysis. UBS gets a comprehensive view on the various social media platforms and UBS Brand Management and Communications Department relies on Accenture to collect and analyze information. Financial Services industry is highly regulated and firms need to follow the stringent regulations and accordingly have to manage their social media presence and customer engagement. It is not easy to keep track of the various social networking sites and it requires highly advanced technologies and analytical tools to capture and analyze social data and use it in further improving the existing and launching new products and services. 

Social Media Marketing Strategy @ Kentucky Fried Chicken- Customer Service & Engagement

Kentucky Fried Chicken has been actively and aggressively using the various social media platforms to promote their menu offerings, promotions, contests, new product launches and most importantly focusing on the freshness and juiciness of their chicken compared to its competitors “It’s really about connecting with fans and making sure the brand remains relevant,” said Rick Maynard, manager of public relations at KFC. KFC is active on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc. and all of these channels play a crucial role in connecting with consumers all over the world. KFC has a highly loyal customer base who loves their food as they go to their restaurants across the world and also engage actively on various social media platforms. This prompted the company to actively build and maintain social media presence and engage with customers on day to day basis. Most of the fans, followers and likes that KFC garnered on various social media platforms are due to their loyal customer base and they did not spend much on building this except for occasional promotional offers and discounts to enhance customer engagement.

The KFC Facebook page has millions of likes, thousands of people talking about the company and thousands of them are checking in and updating their Facebook status. KFC has restaurants in more than 100 countries and KFC’s Facebook pages of specific countries highlight their international audience and customers actively post KFC-themed photos of their KFC restaurant visits from around the world. KFC only posts about 15-20% of promotional content and most of the posts are customer generated content uploaded and shared by customers mostly their experience in the KFC restaurants. The KFC Twitter feed has a good following and the focus is not on pushing sales but most of the tweets are related to genuine fun which most of the company fans appreciate and the two-way communication is working well for the company. Twitter campaign presented a high school senior with a $20,000 Colonel’s scholarship based on a 140-character Twitter application which also highlighted the Colonel Sanders’ dedication to kids and education. The company received nearly 3,000 tweet applications, national news coverage for the program that awards 75 $20,000 college scholarships each year.

KFC manages its corporate social media tools internally, with a cross-functional team and the strategy: to connect and engage with KFC followers, cultivate relationships and respond to any inquiries. Customers are actively contacting through social media platforms both positively and negatively which forced KFC to use social media for customer service purposes. The company does not remove negative posts and if any customer posts a negative comment/post via social media instead of a phone, company ask for details, handle it and thank them for bringing it to our attention. Since customers are looking for quick response on social media platforms the company has exclusive people online for customers’ service during all normal business hours. KFC sees the social media scene as more of an opportunity to interact and engage their customers, not much focus is placed on the return on investment the activity generates. We don’t get a lot of pressure to justify [the return on investment]. It’s a very important customer-service element, and that’s enough for us. It’s about cultivating relationships, and that has a real business output,” Maynard said.

Social Media Customer Service @ Honda Motors Customer Service on Twitter @HondaCustSvc

Social Media is not only for marketing, customer engagement and corporate communication but also is very effective in customer service. Social Media platform like Facebook and Twitter are being widely used by companies to provide customer services. Customer service or after sales service is an essential component of overall customer satisfaction and it often plays a key role in retaining the customers and increase customer loyalty. Automobile companies have embraced the social media aggressively in the past few years and have been effectively using the various social networking sites for brand promotion, customer engagement, product launches, product innovation and last but not the least customer service. Twitter provides the customers a platform wherein they can directly reach the company for solving their complaints and problems. They can express their satisfaction and dissatisfaction of the product and service immediately and companies can respond to the issues fast and avoid further dissatisfaction. For Automobile companies it is even more important as there is severe competition within the industry and dissatisfied customer may even influence other customers including the prospective customers through negative word of mouth. Automobile industry had been going through its fair set of problems mostly related to vehicle recalls due to safety concerns for the drivers by faulty parts and components, product quality and performance issues, dealership issues and non-response of dealers, etc.

Honda Motor America is using twitter for customer service effectively for the past few years and is helping the customers to solve their problems and issues. @HondaCustSVc is an exclusive account for Honda Motors customers to complain about the company products and services. This account is maintained by three exclusive personnel of the company whose photographs are visible on the Twitter account page and they are available Monday to Friday 07.30 hrs to 16.00 hrs PST for resolving the customer complaints. The twitter page also provides the details of the toll free phone number, contact postal address, fax number and customer website address of Honda. There are close to 9,000 followers and close to 7,000 tweets on this specific page and the customer service team are very prompt in responding to the customer complaints. The response time is very fast and they are either resolving the issues or guiding the customers to the relevant place for resolving the issues. Some of the types of complaints on this site are they are dissatisfied with products and services, lack of proper response from dealers, vehicle recalls, schedules and letters and also queries relating to the financing of the vehicles. Some of the tweets highlight severe dissatisfaction of the product and services of Honda Motors and the customer service team is efficiently handling the tweets and avoiding serious repercussions. Twitter interactions of Honda customers are a proof that the customer service through twitter is one of the most efficient ways in which the customers can directly contact company customer service using their mobile devices instantly without any problems and tweet directly with guarantee that they will get the response as soon as possible. A dedicated customer service team is responding to the customer tweets in matter of minutes and guiding customers so that they can resolve their issues immediately. This is good case study for customer service through twitter. 

Social Media @ Lenovo - Customer Service to improved presence on Social Media sites

Lenovo social media engagement started post their acquisition of IBM PC business in 2005 when Lenovo found that there is lot of discussion happening on various online discussion forums & blogs and customers were actively engaging and discussing the various product offerings and Lenovo decided that they should take control and own the responsibility for responding to customer queries and feedback which is critical for future business growth and improve the reputation of the company. Lenovo was a small Chinese player and with IBM PC business acquisition they became a global player with significant market share. Not only they felt the need to respond to customers but also thought that the social media customer engagement strategy will help them in making Lenovo brand a global brand. Within Lenovo all the departments from legal to marketing were assigned responsibility of interacting and managing social media presence. Legal department framed policy and guidelines for social media engagement, marketing and sales have launched specific campaigns targeting customers on various social media platforms, Customer service was provided not only by company’s employees but Lenovo also engaged peer-to-peer customer service communities for interacting with the customers and solving their problems and technical issues.

Customer Service Success - Lenovo created interdepartmental collaboration and powerful partnerships within the organization between the marketing, sales, product development and engineering teams for tackling the customer services issues. Lenovo realized in 2005 that social media could help them understand the customer's point-of-view, the major issues with service, product features, functions, delays in shipments and their impact on the global customers. According to Forrester Case Study “How Lenovo Implemented Customer Service Social Media Best Practices” social media alignment of marketing, sales, service and other departments to accelerate changes and improvements to the customer experience has led to a 20% decrease in laptop service call volumes, an increase in customer service agent productivity, a shortened product problem-resolution cycle and an increase their Net Promoter Scores. The net-net is a reduction in customer service support costs and an increase in sales. Social media engagement with customer was even more necessitated due to the fact that customer service costs for personal computing products was rising constantly, putting pressure on margins and since products were becoming complex, the level of expertise for the customer service representatives also had to be improved by constant training which was adding to the costs and effecting margins.

Social Presence on various sites - Lenovo social media program moved from customer service to a larger program where along with customer service the company used the various social media platforms for marketing its products, new launches, and enhance brand reputation. Lenovo’s has an internal social media team which works round the clock to not only develop but also constantly refresh content (text, images and videos) for all of Lenovo social media pages which include Lenovo Vision YouTube Channel ( Around 9000 subscribers & 14 million video views), official Lenovo Facebook page ( Around 10,000 people talking about Lenovo on Facebook & 350,000 Likes), Flickr stream, Lenovo Blog, Lenovo Twitter feed (not to mention various regional feeds & around 5000 tweets & 22,000 followers) and it’s customized social media website, Lenovo Social which  aggregates all the content from different social media sites in one central location to provide an easy and complete view of all things social wise. Lenovo launched its Community forums in 2007 and it has more than 15,000 volunteers and the forum site is visited by millions of users every month. Till early 2012 Lenovo had pursued multiple blogs strategy by publishing many blogs on various topics but the blogging strategy was changed and redesigned to centralize Lenovo's existing blogs and social media in an engaging, navigable, and branded way, using one easily maintainable CMS.

Social Media use at CES 2012 - During International Consumer Electronics Show or CES 2012 held at Las Vegas, Lenovo used various social media tools and its presence on various social media platforms to reach its targeted audience effectively. Gavin O’Hara, Lenovo’s social media editorial lead, gave Text100.com an in-depth overview of Lenovo’s social numbers as well as measurement tools from CES and a snapshot of the outcome of Lenovo’s social activities during CES, both online and offline were as follows:

• Twitter: Lenovo CES tweets reached a potential audience of 17 million people
• Facebook: Lenovo posts reached an audience of 250,000 people while generating more than 1.3 million impressions. For the week, the Lenovo Facebook page received 3,000 likes, 800 comments & 300 “shares” 
• Flickr: Photos of products, parties and people got more than 25,000 views on the Lenovo photo library
• Lenovo Blogs: The behind-the-scenes blog posts got more than 25,000 page views
• YouTube: Lenovo CES-focused videos were watched by more than 50,000 people in a week. An astonishing 25,000 alone watched the Yoga “Hands On” interview. 

Lenovo Social site which aggregates content from the various social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, blogs, YouTube, Flickr etc. into one place and also helps customers, volunteers and Lenovo teams effectively navigate and manage the back-end of the site to manage blog content, and each contributing author gets his own account with necessary controls to access the content areas relevant to him. Another unique feature of the site is a new tagging schema that de-compartmentalizes blog topics so that users can find content easily, filter by topics, products, recent, or popularity and users can click through all blog posts in one place. Lenovo had set up a digital & social hub in Singapore in 2011 that centralized digital thinking and strategy planning to support marketing plans in various regions and also execute marketing campaigns, monitor buzz, and form support teams dedicated to answer technical questions on social channels. Lenovo social media strategy is all about engaging with customers, informing them about various products & services, solving customer issues and technical problems, and company is effectively using various social media platforms and has achieved its target of being the Global brand. The recently launched “The Do Network”, a new social media-fueled brand engagement highlights the importance of social media presence and engagement in overall Lenovo future growth strategy.  

Social Media impact on Customer Service

The rise of the internet and availability of huge amounts of information on every conceivable topic & subject on the World Wide Web have changed the way customers interact with the businesses. A study by the Corporate Executive Board of more than 75,000 people who had contacted B2C and B2B call centers found that 57% looked for answers on the website before calling the company and such self service oriented customers will help in reducing costs for the businesses as they tend to call the call centers less frequently. Social Media particularly Social Networking sites have become integral part of people’s lives and consumers post more than 1 million social messages every minute and these social messages includes updates about individual’s personal life, share thoughts, content, comments and complaints about the companies with which they interact. Smart companies are listening to these conversations and using social media for much more than marketing. Social media has become one of the platforms for customer service over the last few years and some of the brands like Dell, Lenovo, Best Buy, etc have services their customers through various social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, etc and significantly improved their customer satisfaction levels. There are other traditional channels like email, contact center, help lines, etc available for the customers to interact with the businesses but they are preferring social media most and this is not a recent phenomena as earlier customers and still are using other digital platforms like discussion forums, blogs, chat rooms for customer service. There are instances where businesses when neglected the social media chatter and complaints in regards to their products & services have significantly impacted the brand reputation and even the sales of the products.

This is further highlighted by eMarketer research which reveals that 46% of customers want to solve a problem when they're engaging with a brand on social media, and 39% are looking to give feedback about a product or service. The study from Fishburn Hedges and Echo Research also found that the number of customers engaging with brands through social media doubled from 19% to 38% in just the last eight months. According to the research, 65 per cent of people say that social media is a better way to communicate with companies than call centers.  The 2012 American Express® Global Customer Service Barometer found that consumers who have used social media for service have the most influence as they tell significantly more people about their service experiences, and also say they’d spend 21% more with companies who deliver great service – compared to 13% on average. They are also far more vocal about service experiences, both good and bad. In addition, more than 80% of these consumers say they’ve bailed on a purchase because of a poor service experience, compared to 55% overall. Consumers who use social media for customer service will tell an average of 42 others about a good experience -- and tell an average of 53 people about a bad customer-service experience. The general population, in contrast, will tell 15 people about a good experience and 24 about a negative one.  Businesses have realized that social media is is a valuable service and marketing channel as it allows customers and prospective buyers understand how the company can solve their problems. Despite all the facts Businesses are still not totally hooked on to social customer service and those customers that are using it effectively also feel it is very important to address customer concerns on social media but social customer requests are below 20% of total requests.

Social CRM market will grow in 2012 – Measurable ROI & M&A surge since 2011

Most of the business organizations across the world have been able to some sort of social media presence as demanded by their customers and some of the businesses are trying to actively use social media in their Customer Relationship Management (CRM). Since the usage is at an early stage businesses are finding it difficult to tie with measurable business outcomes. Gartner analysts expect the worldwide market for social CRM software licenses and subscriptions to reach $2.1 billion in 2012, up from $850 million in 2011, and social CRM revenue will represent 10% of the overall CRM market. Social CRM grew 30% in 2011 in revenue terms and is 7% of total CRM spending globally as of 2011. Despite rapid rise in adoption of social applications by sales, marketing and customer service departments, Gartner believes that by this year end, only 50% of Fortune 1000 companies are expected to receive a worthwhile return on investment (ROI) from their social CRM initiatives. Another prediction by Gartner is that by this year end three-quarters of new social CRM initiatives that receive funding will have a business case incorporating measurable ROI. This highlights the fact that both vendors and customers are looking at ways to measure effectively the return of investment (ROI) that Social CRM efforts will generate. In fact the success of social CRM in next couple of years will depend on how well businesses and social CRM technology providers can tie Social CRM investment to clear and measurable business objectives rather than make social CRM projects just social objectives.

Social CRM is no longer a concern of marketing, but it penetrated into most of other marketing functions, sales, customer service and support and its importance is already evident in lead generation, cross-selling and up-selling capabilities, and other major successful sales & marketing functions. Social CRM applications help in capturing and sharing of data between users including the customers and other relevant stakeholders and involve them in developing and improving the products and services through their constant feedback. Social CRM applications can have both internal and external company users, communities both public & private and customers, marketing and service organizations use apps to create brand awareness, gather information, build trust, evaluate decisions, sell and aid post purchase activities. Social CRM adoption has been mostly among business-to-consumer (B2C) type organizations and business to business (B2B) companies are seeking to aggressively invest in social and by end of 2013, B2B organizations using social CRM applications will represent 25 % of all projects worldwide. Gartner expects business-to-business applications for sales use will have the fastest growth and will account for 30% of social CRM spending by 2015, up from 5% in 2011. According to a report from Gartner’s Ed Thompson titled “What’s “Hot” in CRM Application 2012,” Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) delivery of CRM applications represented 34% of worldwide CRM application spending in 2011. More than 50% of all Sales Force Automation (SFA) spending is on the SaaS platform.

Early part of 2012 and the year 2011 saw a flurry of Mergers & Acquisitions in the Social CRM space with large CRM players like Oracle & SAP aggressively buying smaller players in this space. Oracle has continued its social media CRM spending spree with the acquisition of Collective Intellect whose cloud-based applications for social media monitoring would be combined with Oracle’s social relationship platform and earlier Oracle acquired Vitrue for $339 million, a cloud-based social marketing and engagement platform that enables marketers to centrally create, publish, moderate, manage, measure and report on their social marketing campaigns. Salesforce recently announced that it has won a bid to acquire BuddyMedia for $689 million and also recently added Radian6, while Adobe bought up Efficient Frontier last year to push its own social CRM offerings. These acquisitions highlight the need for companies and Social CRM technology vendors to dynamically engage the customers on the various social media fronts and the Social CRM technology must simplify and make the two way communication effective. There is pressure on social CRM technology vendors to differentiate their offerings from their competitors in terms of functions, analytics, ease of use and superior experience delivered through professional services and this need is driving the M&A deals in this segment. According to Gartner Research Director Adam Sarner, “Vendors that can assemble a full set of social CRM functions and make progress in two or more areas, such as marketing and customer service or sales and marketing, will be best-positioned for success.”

Despite all the positive forecasts for Social CRM there is another angle that is highlighted by Gartner, that 50% of Fortune 1000 organizations that are not determining, or even measuring, ROI, will face failed projects. Among the companies who will not see a worthwhile return, only 20% will even have the data to evaluate where their social strategy is falling short. These organizations will be unable to justify future funding according to Adam Sarner. Another critical factor is social CRM works only with user communities participating which they will do only if they perceive value from engagement and Social CRM applications therefore must be more customer-centric than traditional CRM applications and they should allow the customer to manage the relationship and organizations should allow this rather than they trying to manage the customer relationships. Another important fact that business organizations need to keep in mind is that media is constantly evolving and new uses are frequently being discovered, the organization Social CRM strategy should be refined on an ongoing basis. Nucleus has found that early adopters of social CRM have recognized clear benefits, such as increased visibility and productivity. The 11.8% productivity gain is high, and Nucleus expects adoption of social CRM, particularly by salespeople, to grow not just in real numbers, but also in frequency of activity as users become more aware of the technology’s capabilities and as vendors’ offerings mature. And Gartner believes Social CRM technology vendors have to show quantified business cases and, more importantly, deliver repeatable social CRM processes that are not yet broadly available.

Social Media in Customer Service Case Study – Dell Social Media Strategy since Dell Hell

In June of 2005, Jeff Jarvis bought a Dell Lemon and paid a premium for four year in home service plan. He started to face problems with the machine immediately and he contacted Dell for fixing the problems, but there was no proper response from Dell. Dell did not provide good service to Jarvis and with no other option he posted his angry bust on poor Dell Service on his blog Buzz Machine titled "Dell lies. dell sucks”. His blog post generated severe criticism of Dell and other unhappy customers joined and the whole blogosphere started a critical discussion of poor quality of products and how bad is Dell Technical Support service. Dell which was already struggling with poor revenues and blogosphere criticism added fuel to the poor financial performance and hurt Dell reputation badly. The problem of poor customer service and quality of products was not new as Dell was not listening to the customer complaints for long and the blogs had just publicized and gave an opportunity for the aggrieved customers to vent their anger. Dell had the first hand experience how social media can impact the business and how critical it is to listen to customer complaints and fix them fast.

It took one year for Dell to realize the extent of damage caused by the blogs and forced the company to announce a new business plan, called Dell 2.0 in 2006 that included an additional $150m investment in their customer service. The investment included sales channels, both in sales contacts & its online presence, in its website front and back end and expand the scope of Dell Connect, which enables a Dell technician to take control of a customer's system should they be encountering problems. In March 2006 a community outreach team was formed that included group of technical support experts with good interpersonal skills that listens, monitors and reaches out to bloggers around the world who have questions or may require assistance. Direct2Dell was launched in July, 2006 and in August Dell expanded blog outreach to include any conversations about Dell. Initially Direct2Dell blog was received with negative skepticism, but chief blogger Lionel Menchaca convinced bloggers that Dell was seriously listening to the bloggers and he diligently responded and linked to critics. Dell’s team staunched flow of bad buzz and by Dell’s measure negative blog posts about it have dropped from 49% to 22%. Dell even engaged external agency to monitors online conversations about Dell.

In February 2007 Dell launched IdeaStorm that allowed Dell users to provide feedback & valuable insights about the company and its products and vote for those they find most relevant. The Linux community used this platform and suggested Dell brought back XP as an option for customers who wanted it, reduced trialware and listen to customers discuss ideas in real time. StudioDell (January 07) is a place where Dell users could share videos about Dell-related topics and videos and podcasts were used to educate users on various emerging technologies and also offers tips, tricks and support to get the best out of a Dell product. Dell operated blogs and forums for dedicated customer engagement topics, joined Twitter (June 07) with a number of ids. Dell set up a centralized team, appointed a separate leadership and resources were taken from multiple teams (IT, online) to test and launch social engagement tools and websites quickly. This team had developed formal social media strategy and set of social media policies and governance were set in place.

In 2008 Dell social media presence started to yield results in terms of ROI and social media has become part of the business strategy and the various business units were provided specific targets for the social media. Employees were trained and encouraged to actively participate in various social media channels, provide customer support through blogs, twitter, etc and community managers who were responsible for listening and resolution, content planning, technology testing, planning, and measurement were named for various business units. Dell even went further with its social media initiatives a blog for the channel community was launched, online communities were launched for Dell's environmental efforts called Regeneration and technophiles called Digital Nomads and social content appeared on Dell.com (homepage navigation, product pages with ratings & reviews). The Dell outlet, small business and home offers available on Twitter had $500,000 in revenues. Dell started a page focusing on SMBs and fan pages on Facebook.

In 2009, due to the recession pressure social media team had to reduce headcount which led to the departure of key people in the social media facing teams within the Dell. The departures had an impact on the Dell social media presence had seen consolidation in number of blogs & twitter accounts, slow down in response and lack of experience had further worsened the situation. But Dell managed to keep up and worldwide community has grown to more than 3.5 million people across the social web, including places like Twitter, Facebook, Direct2Dell and IdeaStorm. @DellOutlet had close to 1.5 million followers on Twitter with $3 million in revenue and in total Twitter has resulted in more than $6.5 million in revenue. Dell launched the Dell Tech Center in 2009 to revitalize the brand and increase awareness of Dell's solutions capabilities as customers valued a trusted advisor relationship.

Dell consolidated its social media strategy in 2010 with appointment of new leadership to the social media division and together with the old members of dell social media team Dell tried to regain its focus. Another effort from Dell to maintain its focus on social media was to open up a Social Media Listening Command Center in Austin Texas under the leadership of Chief Listening Officer where real-time data is collected and visualized by Radian6 and displayed across rows of monitors that show a unique dashboard, offering instant insights into things like customer sentiment, share of voice and geography. Dell also started on Customer Advisory Panel events with a goal to bring key customers and key advocates to Dell HQ in June 2010 to understand their delights and frustrations. Other DellCAP events were held in China in November 2010, in Germany in January 2011 and again in Round Rock in March 2011, focused on Sustainability topics.

Dell continued to improve its social media presence in 2011 and Social Media Listening Command center is playing a critical role in these efforts. Dell is tracking 25,000 online mentions both posts and tweets about Dell every day and understand this information based on topics, sentiment, share of voice, geography, and trends and use it answer customer questions, address their concerns, build better products, and improve the overall customer experience. Dell has around 5000 employees trained as Social Media professionals and turned them into frontline social marketers who engage in Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, blogs, and more on the company's behalf. Dell views employees’ social media participation as an asset rather than a liability and accordingly doesn’t restrict team members from utilizing mobile devices, apps or social media. Dell is using social media as a platform to support various campaigns and used it in the promotion of its first Customer Event Dell World and launched website, EnterpriseEfficiency.com which is a micro site featured daily, topical blogs written by InformationWeek editors and writers as well as Dell executives to gain insights.

Social media has provided an opportunity for Dell not only to interact with customers, understand their opinions and needs but also provided a marketing platform where in they can advertise their products, improve the brand image and loyalty and improve their revenues with rise in sales. Dell initially entered into social media not to sell its products but to respond to its customer complaints and feedback but customers wanted to access to special deals from its social feeds that link to products, reviews or discounts. Dell is committed to improving overall level of customer service continuously which is 24×7 “always-on” customer service philosophy through social media and has made it a critical part of business strategy with clearly defined policy and is considered as on of the top companies in the world that is significantly profiting through the use of Social media.

Discussion points:

1. How to manage the social media presence and what strategy the company should adopt for its social media presence? ( Control, Policy & Feedback)
2. How to engage employees and other stakeholders in the social media platforms and how to use the information in organizational decision making?
3. How to generate good ROI from the social media marketing initiatives and profit from social media presence?
4. What technologies and platforms are to be used for social media and how to measure ROI?