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Its a no-brainer that Social Networking has taken us by storm. Though it has been the fastest growing addiction leaving behind the growth of TV, Radio and Computers (thanks to the rapid adoption of internet), it still remains a mystery whether Businesses have anything to do and take away from social media. But as the wise say if you aren’t minting out of it, you probably aren’t using it well.
The latest in the social media success stories is Dell (again!), who recently announced that they have made $ six and a half million just by their social media presence. Their “chief blogger” Lionel Manchaca recently blogged about this success via this post. What’s great to understand here is at first Dell failed miserably in utilizing the Internet, than was a time they decided to fight back. Back in June this year they reported a 3 million revenue from their social media presence and today just in six months that figure has more than doubled.
I think it would be great to pull some pointers about this incident and what it tries to communicate
- Are you there? - Social media presence is now more than just a fad. Being on the internet at times portray the company to be young, energetic, and on toes to connect with its customers. You need to identify which networks add the right zeal to your marketing and how your consumers are expecting to connect with you.
- Why is it so important? - It gives a great platform for user feedback. Churning profits out of the free feedback and publicity can work better than burning dollars on the social media consultants and gurus. By the way when was the last time you actually figured out from the back of your toothpaste or toilet soap the number of the company to complain about their product ? Imagine if the soap company was on twitter, won’t providing feedback by tweeting a much possible option?
- It’s a Double sided sword ! - It can definitely attack back on you. Nobody knows if I call up a company and crib about their pathetic service but everyone knows if I blog or tweet about it. Hence even if you are not active you need to be vigilant to social media updates. It can harm equally the way it helps.
- Monitor Monitor Monitor - Whether you are there or not, you need to constantly monitor it. Stories spread fast and bloggers, tweeters are anxious to talk about it (Like me talking to you about Dell, right now). You need to keep on monitoring, and channelizing masses your way.
- Are you networking? – It makes no sense just to have a face book or twitter profile. You need to connect, network and interact. Nobody will start following you because you are just there on twitter, you need to work out. When we talk about Dell making 6.5 million dollars don’t forget it already has 3.5 million followers in total on the social networking sites. As the witty chief blogger writes, that’s “…roughly a fan base the size of the population of Chicago”.
- Using social media is a task of its own – Yes, this I believe is a key point to note. You can’t get all the feedback compiled and networking done just by outsourcing the task to a college nerd. Dell has around 100 people who tweet across 35 channels. So now you know the reason behind, how the 6.5 millions come flowing.
- At the end, patience pays – Dell has failed couple of times before coming in to lime light for the right reasons. If strategy, execution and patience is what pays finally in business world, the rules for online networking are pretty much the same.
So these were the top 7 lessons that we can extract from Dell’s success. Hope you had a good read and gained some mental stimulus to seriously think about your online image. What are you waiting for? Go ahead Charlie, Network, scrap, poke, tweet … do whatever you can to make those extra Dellers. I mean Dollars 
PS – For those who like to get updated about new posts here at BizDharma or want to pass on some feedback I am @himanshuchanda on Twitter. Follow me!
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Hey Himanshu great post. True companies now need to take social networking seriously as Dell has raised the bar..
Nice lessons. Dell is so large that it can be successful whatever social networking it used, I begged it would also succeed if it used Facebook. But it wouldn’t be so successful if it didn’t follow these 7 principles.
Quite true Young that Dell would have made it even on facebook but I doubt whether its anything to do with its size. Zappos was not BIG so to say always but it is a case study that we will iterate for ages to come on success of social media implementation
thanks for the information you provide is added knowledge, I would always visit your blog to get the information more.
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