» Bob Pearson - Vice President of communities and conversations for Dell (#2)
» Tim Mapes - Senior Vice President of Marketing at Delta Air Lines
» Barbara Basney - Director of global advertising for Xerox
» Robert Greenberg - Vice President of Corporate Brand Marketing for Panasonic
» Jason Dowdell - Founder of MarketingShift
» Ed Faruolo - Vice President of Brand Development and Advertising at Lincoln Financial Group
» Roy Bostock - Chairman of the Board of Yahoo, Inc.
» Gary Briggs - former SVP, Chief Marketing Officer, eBay North America
Bob Pearson’s title at Dell, VP of communities and conversations, says a lot about both his role and the role that Dell believes its users should play in building the Dell brand. As Bob said during our recent conversation, “Our best work is when we are in partnership with the community.” This was one of the key themes in my new book BrandDigital. Smart organizations should be using digital media, social media, to engage consumers in conversations about their brands in order to continuously create better brand experiences. Bob agreed that with all of the new tools and technologies available to marketers today there has never been a greater opportunity to know what’s on the customer’s mind and to respond in meaningful ways. I began our conversation by asking him about Dell’s general philosophy regarding consumer engagement.
BP: It’s not so much a philosophy, but common sense, not to mention it’s the way we’ve always done business. We were one of the first major companies to deal directly with consumers. What’s changed is the number of tools we have, and that customers have, to talk about brands. There can be 4,000 – 5,000 conversations going on online about Dell on any given day. We use blog monitoring software to listen to what people are saying about us and carefully narrow our focus to understand which communities to listen to and which topics are of greatest relevance to a majority of our customers. If people are not happy about something we want to do something about it quickly.
AA: Determining which conversations to engage in amidst the thousands going on about a brand is seen as one of the primary challenges marketers have today. Many marketers I’ve spoken to said they don’t want to be seen as “party crashers.” How do you get into a social media dialog without being seen as crashing the party?
BP: It’s funny you should say that. I’ve seen many organizations enter online conversations as if they were going to someone’s dinner party wearing a sandwich board imprinted with their company’s name. That’s not how to do it. You have to figure out which blogs matter, which forums matter, and which communities matter. First determine where there’s intense interest about your brand and then enter into the conversation in a way that’s appropriate to the particular community. It’s their community, not yours. They make the rules. You must engage with the participants in an open and honest manner. Initially you’re likely to see complaints about your brand come out of the woodwork. It’s important to remember that, good or bad, all conversations are valuable. People won’t trust you if you only listen to the good stuff. In order to be seen as credible, you’ve got to listen to and respond to consumer frustrations and concerns. How can you honestly make your brand experience better if you’re not willing to listen to what’s bothering people?
AA: One of the hypotheses I present in my book is that “who” you are as a brand has become more important than the “what.” Behavior and action are almost more important than the actual widget you make.
BP: I’d say that digital technology gives the brand a more substantial, more dimensional personality. People can give us reviews of our products and services. They can talk to each other, help each other, listen to and respond to each others’ questions. You can see a brand from many more perspectives than before and, most important, not just the brand organization’s perspective. Your brand is the entirety of what you do and how you do it.
AA: Relative to this, I’ve heard interesting things about the Dell site, IdeaStorm. Talk to me a bit about this.
BP: IdeaStorm is a site we established specifically to engage our users in the development of Dell products and services. People can post ideas, promote ideas that are of interest to them and discuss these ideas with each other. Our engineers watch the voting and read our customer’s posts as they plan the development of our products. For example, our new Latitude business laptops had 130 ideas in IdeaStorm and six of the new features in the Latitudes were directly related to ideas from our customers. Customers certainly enjoy giving us input, but they also like the forum it provides them to talk to other customers. IdeaStorm is not about us. It’s about the community, itself. Our role is to unlock the value of the community for our users and to listen every day to what they have to say.
AA: You see Dell’s role as creating a relevant community and giving consumers the tools they need to communicate with each other. I’m sure you derive value from observing how customers help other customers. It helps you understand where you should be going next.
BP. Yes, but I want to emphasize that it’s not about the tools, per se. The world is too focused on the tools and not focused enough on the conversations people are sharing. It’s about what the tools facilitate. It’s really about content sharing. In other words, it’s not about what’s inside the telephone, but what the telephone does. Focus on the objective. What do you want to learn from your customers and from people who are influential in your industry? After you determine this you can determine the best way to reach your customers and engage with them.
AA: With so much information available, how do you determine what to focus on?
BP: You can listen to a thousand conversations a day, but it’s essential to bring in key influencers on a regular basis. We invite key industry bloggers to come in and talk with our product managers, our customer service managers, and our engineers. We have customers to come in and talk to us. Online forums are only part of the conversation. We include “brick and mortar” in our learning to help us determine how to better and more relevantly frame online interactions. When we listen, we learn And when we learn, we can provide more value to our customers. Pretty simple.
AA: One of the challenges marketers are having is how to pull it all together, the digital agency, the traditional agency, the blogs, the Web sites, etc. Is there a way to manage this?
BP: Digital media is a new discipline. It’s not any one thing, not marketing, not customer care, not product development, but, rather, it should be incorporated into the entire brand experience. The problem is that companies look at the digital environment and ask, “Should we have a blog?”This is not the question anyone should be asking. Rather it’s more, “How should we incorporate digital into the entire brand journey, or how should we be using digital technology to better meet customer needs?” To succeed in today’s marketplace you have to become a student of social media, not an observer. You must be on a constant learning curve. There are 1.5 billion people online today. 500,000 people go online every day, on average, for the first time in their lives and most of these people are in Asia, Eastern Europe and Latin America. Follow what’s going on in these countries. What does your company need to do to not just keep up, but to stay ahead of the dynamics of social media? If you’re not constantly learning, if you’re not a student of what’s going on online, you’ll never catch up. You’ll never know what your customers are doing, or what’s important to them.