CIOIN

Manish Mehta, VP, Global Online, Dell--and one of the men behind Dell’s Ideastorm and its Twitter sales channel--shares learnings from their social media journey, and new examples of how Dell leverages it.

Dell’s Twitter Outlet has been credited as a great sales ground for the company. Can you elaborate how social media helps in direct sales?

Social commerce is a small, yet significant, part of our social media initiative.The fundamental premise is recognizing that customers are looking for certain types of products at certain price points. The Dell Twitter outlet is a channel for these types of sales. It is based of three simple tenets of social commerce: urgency, scarcity and predictable delivery.
You create urgency by putting up a great offer but with an expiry date on it. You create scarcity by making only a small number of products available at this price point. And you create a predictable delivery meaning so that a customer can have by the next day. The confluence of these three elements is beautiful for social commerce.
Another thing to remember about social commerce is that customers are looking for confidence, validation, and assurance through the eyes of other customers.

Is social media equally effective in B2B sales as it is for B2C?

We have seen far greater traction in the B2B space. Let me give you an example of the Dell Tech centre, which is a community for CIOs and IT decision makers. The sales cycle for enterprise class products is very long, and often CIOs have to connect with their peers and other thought leaders to help make those decisions. The Dell tech center helps them do that.
When they come to the tech center, we know where they are in the sales cycle just based on their conversations. We then plot out a prioritization score, our sales team reaches out to them, based on that score. Using this information, the sales team is in a much better position to close a deal, and the customer is left much happier.
How is Dell is using social media for product development and crowdsourcing?

At Dell’s Ideastorm, we welcome ideas from users, which are then voted on by the users. It’s a complete crowdsourcing model and we’ve now taken those ideas into the early engineering planning cycle.
Where product development is concerned, this approach is not only useful for crowdsourcing or ideating, it’s also an early warning system for product quality. After we have shipped a product, social media acts as an early warning system, giving us feedback long before the phones ringing at our contact center.
If there are things people like about a product, we adjust our marketing to focus on those aspects. If there defects, our product quality team will makes the necessary changes for the next set of products.  This has been incredibly impactful and has resulted in cost savings as well as improving customer experience.
Most social media pushes stem from the marketing department. Is that changing?

The same analogue existed between marketing and IT when the Internet started. I was one of the founding members of Dell.com. For the first four years, Dell.com sat in the marketing department and all the data was owned by them.
With the maturity of the Internet, it became clear that CIOs needed to be more proactively involved in the development of that environment. The same is happening now with social media. Marketing, communications, and customer service are taking the lead and CIOs are, initially, reacted negatively.
When they see employees spend a lot of time on these sites, they detect networking challenges and shut down these networks immediately. These draconian measures create a revolt within a company. But CIOs are learning and are now much more considerate about employee access.

But isn’t social media essentially a marketing prerogative?

At Dell, we think of social media as being embedded across the fabric of the entire company. There is not a function inside the company that does not leverage social media.Most people unfortunately view social media as marketing campaigns. But the challenge today is to use social media to create sustainable relationships with customers.
Social media is as much a CIO prerogative as it is marketing’s. If you are a CIO, you have to create infrastructure that employees can use to collaborate internally over content that comes in via external networks.
On the customer service front, CIOs have to think about how to integrate customer input into their case management, CRM systems, and lead generation programs. Our IT teams are now thinking of how not to just capture a tweet, or a Facebook post, but how to add that to someone’s profile in our CRM systems. This way we know someone’s social history and interaction, and can help build a more complete profile of that person.

What are CIOs afraid of really?

What are CIOs afraid of really?

A CIOs worst nightmare is not having a standard platform. As newer platforms and operating systems emerge, this is becoming a huge challenge for them. That’s why CIOs have to be comfortable building middleware or finding middleware that can take any application and plug it into their infrastructure.
Many enterprises still run antiquated systems and with all of these emerging technologies, a CIO doesn’t know how to integrate all the data while marketing is jumping forward. CIOs need to be less draconian about access social media and focus on finding middleware.And CIOs are also going to have to create not just the collaborative tools, but websites, lead generation and social tools, and device a system which traps all that data.