BuzzMachine

When I blogged that I was headed down to Austin and the University of Texas last week, I got email out of the blue from Dell’s chief blogger, Lionel Menchaca, inviting me to meet him and his colleagues over drinks or out at Dell HQ. I said I hadn’t been planning to pack my flak jacket and he replied, “Even though it is Texas, there will be no guns involved.”

When I met Lionel at the bar, he said that he’d told his mother he was coming to meet me and she worried: “Are you going to be OK?”

I think I know how Ehud Olmert feels when he goes to visit the neighbors.

If you’re coming late to this story, I had a rather infamous run-in with Dell here at Buzzmachine when I complained about a bad machine and service. They ignored me, but thousands of similarly frustrated customers did not. Dell’s attitude toward blogs at the time was “look, don’t touch.” But it soon became apparent that my fellow Dell-hell travelers and I were a leading indicator of other problems at the company in quality and service, not to mention revenue, marketshare, and share price (to say nothing of accounting issues). But things began to turn around when Dell opened a company blog, which was off to a puffy start until Lionel, the chief blogger, entered, speaking with customers in an honest, direct, humble, and human voice. Next they put together a team to reach out to bloggers who had problems. They started a social-y site called IdeaStorm so customers could tell Dell what to do. And when the company realized how much of a turnaround it needed, Michael Dell took charge again. He and I even met at Davos. So this is the point in the story when I come to Texas.

Punch lines (and punches) aside, I had a fascinating, even gratifying, visit with Lionel and his colleagues, Richard Binhammer, one of the blog outreach team, and Dwayne Cox, their boss and a corporate executive and spokesman.

It is clear, through them, that at least at some levels, Dell has changed its culture and certainly its attitude toward bloggers. They now see value in reaching out. As they’ve said before, bloggers tend to state their problems clearly, which makes it easier (and, I assume, more efficient) to solve them. A problem solved is not only a customer likely to be saved, but also often leads to good PR and branding as the bloggers recount their happy endings. And the Dell guys say they get information and data from this; they hear about problems that may arise before others in the company do, because their customers are talking about it.

The team said that IdeaStorm was Michael Dell’s own idea and passion. And before we met, the company announced that because of IdeaStorm they’d decided to offer Linux now not just in servers and workstations but also in desktops and laptops. The people at IdeaStorm pushed this hard. Dell came back worried about how many flavors of Linux it would need to ship and support. They wrote:

The IdeaStorm community’s interest in open source solutions like Linux on Dell platforms has come through loud and clear. Many of you have suggested a survey to help Dell determine which distribution is most popular, and we think that’s a great idea. Based on your idea, we now have a short survey, which will be open until March 23, where you can tell us more about your favorite distribution of Linux, your preferred method of support, and more.

More than 100,000 people took that survey, leading to Dell’s announcement. And the discussion continues on the blog.

Welcome to the age of customer control. This isn’t just crowdsourcing. This is crowdmanaging. Companies still fear this. But, hell, if even Dell can lean back and let its customers begin to take charge, anyone can.

Still, it’s only a start. None of this is to say that Dell’s problems are over. Judging by the emails, comments, and links to further Dell hell stories that I still get just about every day, the problems with quality and service continue. I do see the Dell people coming into my comments and solving problems; I do hear from customers who are grateful to them. But by and large, most of the contact I get (and there’s not much I can do with any of it) is further recounting of problems. When I met Michael Dell, he said they still have a lot of work to do. They do.

An organization of this size and international scope can’t be changed overnight. But Dwayne Cox made it clear over drinks that Dell now knows it is a company in turnaround mode. The first step is admitting you have the problem. The next is figuring out how to fix it. And if the company now has its customers involved in that process, I have to believe that it will at least be better informed.

Lionel, who came from years of customer service and PR at the company, said the team working on the blog and with bloggers loves it. Aren’t there a few people out there who just can’t be satisfied, no matter what you do? Lost causes? Bozos? They agreed that there are a few and the outreach people don’t always say yes to their demands. But my drinking companions agreed that in an open forum, other folks tend to know who the bozos are. And the bozos tend to stand alone.

That, you see, was the real moral to my story. Whether or not I was a bozo, I did not stand alone. My story wasn’t about me but the people around me, the ones who said, “me, too.” I was merely the agent of coalescence. That’s what you have to watch for on the internet. That’s what the internet enables.

Dell, like many companies, is looking at new software that will make finding and analyzing these points of coalescence easier. But one of the morals of their story is that reports of data — vectors of the frequency of the use of the phrase “dell hell” — take you only so far. The canary may warn of trouble, but it doesn’t know the way out of the mine. You need people talking with your customers. And that’s why Richard Binhammer and the guy who tried to help me, John Blain, are so important. They can actually fix problems and answer questions. They can make judgments. Most of all, they can enter into a conversation with people. And that conversation need not always be about falling on the company sword. They can also tell you when you’re wrong. Richard said that when the Linux talk bubbled up, one blogger pooh-poohed it and said Dell would never release Linux machines. After Dell announced that it would, Richard went back to the guy’s blog, smirking, with a dish of crow. Companies make a big mistake when they think that their customers are out for blood and battle. No, we’re out for a conversation with a real person. We’re reasonable — most of us — when we are treated reasonably.

And there is the genius of Lionel Menchaca. In a flash, he transformed the image of Dell in my eyes. From a company that wanted to look at but not touch people like me, that wanted customers to come deal in the company’s space on the company’s terms, here suddenly was a guy who spoke honestly and directly. He admitted the company’s problems. But he also answered back. When I criticized the Dell blog in its first days for not linking and conversing (and remember that some readers said I should stop harping on them and get a life), he stepped up. He told me over drinks that he remembers when I said talking to a blog without links was like talking to a brick wall. He knew that was true; he was just so busy getting the blog launched that he hadn’t joined in yet. But then he started linking and conversing. Here, we all could see, was a reasonable man. He immediately earned the respect of me and many other bloggers; this, too, was a point of coalescence. Like Robert Scoble, he gave a borgish company a human voice. He gave us respect and got respect in return.

It works.

So what fascinates me so much about Dell is that it can rise from worst to first. Precisely because it got hammered by customers now empowered to talk back to the wall, it had to get smarter faster. Whether Dell can fix the rest of its problems, I don’t know. But if it keeps on the road it’s now on, it could well end up being the smartest company in the age of customer control. That would be one helluva turnaround.

Over nachos and fried somethings (don’t tell my wife or cardiologist), Dwayne Cox, the boss, pointed to the guys across the table and said that it was because of me that they had their jobs. I doubt that. But still, that was the gratifying part of the evening. For you see, just as I’m sure the people at Dell got quite sick quite a while ago of hearing the name Jeff Jarvis, I got tired of being the poster boy for the angry and suddenly empowered customer. I don’t repudiate or recant anything from my Dell hell experience. I just got tired of the story not advancing.

And so it was a delight to sit down with three guys from Dell and look at the new world from the same side. These guys get it. They understand what I had to learn (and made my first law): Give us control and we will use it. Don’t and you will lose us. And that’s what puts us on the same side of the table.

There’s more I want to learn about this transformation and so I’m angling to find an excuse to go back to Austin . . .but I promise I won’t get a Dell tattoo. (I should add that I paid for my beers.)

So when the evening was over, Binhammer gave me a ride to the restaurant where the UT symposium was having dinner. But I got the address wrong and we couldn’t find it. So I told him he should just drop me off and I’d get a cab. He refused. What if I got rolled? Then the story the next day would say: “…Jarvis, last seen with a Dell employee…” He delivered me safely home. And I suspect that on his way home, Lionel called his mom to say that, yes, he was OK, too.

Oliver Ryan has an amusing lead to his Fortune tory about buzz:

Michael Dell was mingling in Davos, Switzerland, this winter when he spotted the blogger Jeff Jarvis and went over to apologize. It had been nearly two years since Jarvis posted a series of irate messages to his BuzzMachine blog about the failings of his Dell computer. The posts eventually drew national attention, and Jarvis’s headline DELL HELL has since become shorthand for the ability of a lone blogger to deliver a body blow to an unsuspecting business.

Two years later, poised to retake the helm at his company, Michael Dell undoubtedly figured it couldn’t hurt to make nice.

All that could have been avoided if, in 2005, Dell’s operatives had had access to the services of Bay Area startup BuzzLogic, which is the newest of a generation of companies with Web software designed to spot and neutralize an incendiary blogger before a marketing conflagration ensues.

John Cass gets the Dell story right, I think:

Is the biggest blogging story of 2007 the resignation of chief executive Kevin Rollins at Dell? As investors.com reports did Jeff Jarvis of BuzzMachine help Dell’s earnings fall, and in the process seal the fate of key executives at Dell? No, is the simple answer to that question, lackluster profits and a competitive marketplace having more to do with Dell’s troubles and the changes among the company’s top managers. . . . The story demonstrates that any company working in a competitive technology market must pay attention to the content customers generate online or otherwise face the danger of poor results. Though hard to bear at the moment Dell will benefit from responding to customer feedback, and in turn Dell customers will benefit in return. If Dell becomes the new gold standard for online customer service and technology customer service through blogging, its customers have a lot to be concerned about if they fail to keep up and follow the same conversational marketing strategies.

I was at the party at Davos, thrown by the German newsmagazine Focus and Hubert Burda (video soon) and whom should I meet but Michael Dell. I thought I’d need to try to corner him at the session on web 2.0 but he approached me.

Of course, it was all cordial. This is Davos. And it should have been cordial. I told Dell that I have seen his people improve impressively on the blog front, reaching out to bloggers with service problems and blogging openly.

He apologized for my bad computer. I brushed that off; old news. I told him that I never intended to start a riot. When I hit a wall with my computer, I just blew of steam on my blog. But once I did, I, too, learned how amazing the internet is at allowing people to coalesce.

He said that they have a lot of work to do and I agreed. Improving communication doesn’t necessary solve the underlying problems. But listening to your customers can only help and I said that blogs are amazing, for they are a new way to hear your customers. I started into my spiel about handing over control to your customers and pointed him to Treonauts as a place where customers sell the product, create the marketing message, provide customer service, and even help design the product. I didn’t start sermonizing, though. Nor did I dispute what he said about this case at CES. This is Davos. This was a party. And Steve Case came up at that moment.

I have a bigger bone to pick with Case, since I still own my damned Time Warner stock. Moments later, a writer for one of Time’s magazines walked by, saw Case, and growled, “There’s the guy who tanked my company.” But we didn’t say this to him. This is Davos. It was a party.

By the way, I told Dell that I have since bought a new Dell monitor for my son.

I’m sitting in the front row for a panel on internet governance with future guy Paul Saffo, internet godfather Vint Cerf, Oxford Jonathan Zittrain, John Markoff, ITU Secretary General Hamadoun Toure, and Michael Dell. Yes, Michael Dell (more on that later; I met him last night). And yes, I have my Mac laptop open. Liveblogging a bit…..

Markoff says that “unless we find a way to police the commercial internet, it won’t survive…. (or) we’ll have to walk away from the internet and leave it like you’d leave a bad neighborhood.” That is, he fears for attacks on servers from around the world. He says that we have “a thriving security industry that sells fear” but that has not done a good job protecting consumers. He talks about pirated copies of Vista coming with trojans and about botnets; Cerf adds that there may be more than 100 million machines ensnared in this giving the bad guys supercomputers, as Markoff says. He talks about malware that took up to 15 percent of Yahoo’s search to grab the random text that is going into the current wave of spam to get it through the filters. Markoff is asked whether policing is the right metaphor; Cerf says others call it a fire department and the goal is still to put out the fire. Toure says this needs a global response. So the metaphor shifts to pandemics and vaccinations.

Cerf adds that “in spite of all the turmoil… the internet seems to be working, it’s a very resilient system.” He says it’s not just the net that needs work but also the operating systems that allow hackers to dig deep into them to do bad.

Dell says that the internet is largely anonymous “but the question has to be asked, as these issues and challenges escalate into ever more disruptive and vexing problems can this continue to be an almost completely anonymous system.” Cerf replies that there are good reasons to authenticate and validate (e.g., servers, domains) and that they can build a more refined structure. “Anonymity has its value and also its risks.” He says he reminds us that the United States was built on anonymous tracts.

Asked to give good news, Dell jokes that he has was to get that spam to you faster. He says there are two big opportunities. One is the unused spectrum that will be freed up in the shift to digital TV and opens up new communication and devices. The other is fibre, where the U.S. is behind. “We think of that is the real broadband.”

Zitrain gives a typically cogent explanation of where we are: from the whimsy of the start of the internet to the hard reality of security invasions that are too great to count. He says it is like the days of the old phone network when the means of communication are the same as the means of control, allowing hackers to break in with a Cap’n Crunch whistle. Zittrain is worried about the world of information appliances tethered to their makers, allowing central control of our devices. He says that the solutions will come, “similar to global warming,” by finding ways to track what is happening to our environment.

Well, I was getting all huggy with Dell — until I see that Michael Dell took a swipe at me at CES. He held a session with bloggers there and Dwight Silverman reports:

Michael Dell says he was “very aware” of blog guru Jeff Jarvis’ crusade against his computer company over poor customer service when it was going on, and now concedes that the way it was handled at the time was a mistake.

Dell’s mea culpa came today during a meeting with bloggers, Dell customers and journalists in a conference room at the Hilton Hotel next door to the Las Vegas Convention Center, where CES is under way.

The conversation included a wide range of topics, from Dell’s blogging initiatives to its Alienware acquisition to business strategies. But the focus kept coming back to issues of customer service, and Dell’s stumbles in that area.

Dell seemed earnest about wanting to be responsive to what people are saying online about his company, and said he now spends “quite a bit” of time reading blogs.

I asked Dell if he knew about Jarvis’ jihad — which has since been dubbed “Dell Hell” — when it was going on in mid-2005, and he said, “Oh, yes.” I asked if he was involved in the decision internally not to respond to Jarvis publicly, and he didn’t answer directly.

But Dell did say that, while his company could have handled it better, steps were taken behind the scene to satisfy Jarvis.

“At various stages, we went to great lengths to resolve the situation,” Dell said. “At points, it seemed like he wasn’t interested in a resolution. But I am not going to place all the blame on him. I’d say we deserve a majority of the blame.”

He later said the company wanted to turn the phrase “Dell Hell” into “Dell Help.”

Since then, Dell has dramatically increased its outreach to bloggers, and he said the company would soon expand its Studio Dell — a service unveiled today in which its managers blog about their initiatives — to include Dell’s own customers, turning it into a kind of PC-enthusiasts’ YouTube.

I made it clear that my problem with Dell was solved with a refund, which came as a result of email to a since-departed vice-president and a call from an assistant, not from blogging. There was nothing whatsover “behind the scenes;” I wrote about any and all contact with Dell, which was minimal. And let’s also be clear that the real issue in the end was not me or my computer but was Dell’s treatment of its customers and relationship to those who blogged about the company and their experience — and, ultimately, the impact of customer service on the finances of the company.

As I’ve said, I see an impressive change in the attitude of Dell toward its customers from the bottom. I wonder still about the top.

: Oh, and though I have not said much of anything about Dell in quite a long time, to this day, I still get almost daily comments and emails from people telling their own tales.

I like what Dell’s Lionel Menchaca blogged in response to Robert Scoble’s argument that Apple gets a free ride in PR vs. Dell:

Media coverage isn’t the real issue—it’s really about our customers’ experience when they deal with Dell. No question that incidents of poor customer service resulted in bad PR for us. And it wasn’t just Jeff Jarvis. Could we have handled that situation better than we did? You bet. For us, there wasn’t an arbitrary tipping point—things were bad so we’ve tried to fix them and will continue to do so.

I wandered by Dell’s blog yesterday and saw a nice video with the team of customer support folks who are now reaching out to blogger/customers who need help. What’s so nice about it is that they take the time to read the blogs and get to know the customer’s needs there so they’re ahead of the game when they make contact. And then I was amused and amazed to hear one of them, John Blain, talk about contacting me. Click on the video:

Click To Play

I just got off a most amusing press conference call with Dell announcing with much fanfare its new ethics policy for the blog world in association with WOMMA (see the two posts below).

I sensed that the reporters on the call found it as curious as I did that Dell thinks this is new and worthy of a big announcement. Isn’t it always a company’s policy, in any interaction — by blog, telephone, or letter — to be open and honest?

They try to argue that blogs are new and they need to teach employees how to be ethical in their interaction with them. Said the leader of WOMMA: “We’re making it easy to be ethical.”

I think my mother made that easy when she told me not to lie. And she didn’t belong to any Association of Ethical Moms.

In fact, I think it’s possibly dangerous to put up this elaborate construct of policies and guidelines and toolkits and announcements. The message to employees should be as simple as this:

Tell the truth.

Now I didn’t want to drag Dell through glass over my blog encounters with them and their ad agency. But on the call, I did ask — twice — what they have learned from their interaction with blogs, reminding them of what Dwight Silverman learned when they told him their policy toward blogs was “look, don’t touch.” I saw after the call that on the Dell blog, in a post that went up at that moment, Lionel Menchaca acknowledged that past: “Dell Hell happened just over year ago and while we’re pleased with some of the progress we’ve made so far, we know we’ve just scratched the surface.” Good on him.

On the call, though, the executives would not acknowledge that past or any lessons in any way. They kept insisting that this announcement was “not reactive but proactive” and that they were taking a “proactive leadership position.” (I hate that corporatespeak.) And that’s too bad, because a moment of honesty about Dell’s lessons might be more helpful to other companies than a hundred bullets on an ethics policy.

I also asked, by the way, about employees blogging and they said that employees could blog now and, in response to the question, they said that executives will blog, including Michael Dell. I look forward to linking to him.

Dell says it is making some announcement about blogging tomorrow with the Word of Mouth Marketing Association. But as Ed Moltzen discovers, it’s not blogging now. It’s “electronic dialogue.”

Steve Rubel takes a list of the top 100 advertisers and then sees where Wikipedia articles about them come up in Google search results. Not surprisingly — once you think about it — these open articles come up high, in many cases in the first page of Google results. That is to say that these advertisers, who spend billions on their brands, are subject to the open judgments of the public. Of course, they have always been subject to the views of their customers — what is a brand but that? — only the internet and Wikipedia allow them to come together and share those views without commercial filters.

Steve cautions companies to be aware of what these articles say but not to try to manipulate them. Amen.

Someone just told me about a company that was planning to write a Wikipedia article about its ad slogan. I won’t say which company in hopes that they listened to the friendly and firm advice I gave to the person who told me about this: It is evil and stupid.

Life is spam.

: By the way, I note that my tag page for Dell comes up 11th on the Google search, on the second page. I’m glad it’s the tag page, versus just one post, for it includes the more positive things I have said about Dell lately; it is a fuller and more balanced view. This is a benefit of tag pages ending up as permalinks for topics. More tag magic.

Steve Hamm at Business Week has a good chronicle of the blog pressure that led to Dell, Apple, and Sony’s recall of their batteries.

The cybermedia didn’t merely expose the dangers of computers catching fire. They kept the heat on the manufacturers to do something about it and helped the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) conduct an investigation into the burning batteries.

Note well that the now-blogwise Dell thanked bloggers:

Dell credits the blogosphere for helping it get through the crisis. “Information travels around quickly,” says spokeswoman Gretchen Miller. “Also, it’s another channel to get the message to our customers so they can be safe.”

This, too, is networked journalism: customers able to gather together as an effective watchdog.