Over the summer, I wrote a post praising Dell for dipping a toe into the blogosphere. Still smarting from the deep burns caused by the Jeff Jarvis Dell Hell incident of summer 2005, they could have chosen to stick their corporate head in the sand and continue to ignore the cruel cruel blogosphere. Instead, they learned how to listen, how to engage in a transparent way, and had the courage to start doing it, even if it was awkward at first.

Today, they took another big step. In March 2005, when I convinced Dell consumer marketing senior management to join WOMMA, I was a lone wolf (on a lone planet in a lone galaxy far, far away). Today, 20 months later, 2 of Dell’s most credible top executives - John Hamlin and Lynn Tyson - did a press call with WOMMA CEO Andy Sernovitz and have formally announced that they are the first company to employ WOMMA’s ethics toolkit. What a difference time can make.

It is my great hope that Dell will receive some love for taking this step and that it will encourage them to keep going. Dell is currently blogging, actively listening to customers regarding customer service issues, and including bloggers in their PR activities, but there is far more business headroom to be claimed. Listening could inform product development, marketing, and maybe even their go-to-market strategy. Maybe listening to or conversing with customers could hold the answer that could put them back in leadership position they used to so audaciously own. Hopefully Dell will be encouraged to find out…

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 9th, 2006 at 2:04 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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