Dell Earns Forrester Research’s Prestigious “Voice of the Customer” Award

Allen Mireles — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 21:59:43 +0000

As a social media consultant I have often cited Dell for its work in social media. Today I use Dell as an example of a corporation using social media to connect with customers; really listen to complaints and suggestions; and begin the work of making changes in its processes. Social media consultant, Mack Collier, predicts that this type of event “…is an example of the next evolution of social media for companies.”

This week, in the same week that Dell earned the prestigious “Voice of the Customer” award from Forrester Research, its social media team released “CAPtivating Conversation: Dell CAP Days Participants Speak Their Mind”; video of the participants in its inaugural Customer Advisory Panel. We were interviewed briefly before and after the panel discussions and the video captures our candid responses.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-BkmmVrOXMs&feature=player_embedded[/youtube]

The Forrester Research award recognized Dell and two other companies for “…initiatives that enable companies to dramatically improve how they collect, interpret, and react to customer feedback.” The Customer Advisory Panel while not called out in the Forrester press release, certainly falls within that category. In a post on the Direct2Dell.com blog, Gary Fox states that “we understand that our company’s continued success is based on a common theme—putting customers at the heart of everything we do. How customers use their technology to grow and succeed is at the center of why we exist.” I’m glad they feel that way since it bodes well for the future.

As a participant in the panel I was flown in to Austin and treated with great hospitality. I enjoyed meeting members of the Dell social media team and other Dell panel members with shared concerns. Most of us left Austin feeling that the people working within Dell were committed to making changes. As importantly, we felt that they were really listening to us. An valuable trait in today’s marketplace.

That Dell has many issues to address in turning itself around is increasingly clear. That Dell recognizes this and is putting the pieces in place to makes changes now seems equally clear. The follow up from the initial meetings has been solid and the discussion continues on Twitter (#DellCAP) and in the Dell online community forums.

As Gary Fox states in his post, “The Forrester Research Voice of the Customer Award demonstrates that we’re headed in the right direction.” I concur. Congratulations on the award and good luck on the work ahead. We’ll be watching.

Google Seems to Have Misplaced My Facebook Fan Page—Have You Seen It Anywhere?

Allen Mireles — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 14:52:06 +0000

Until recently a search on my name in either Google or Yahoo produced the same results: my website and blog, my profiles on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter; and my fledgling Facebook fan page for my social media consulting business. As a social media consultant, I have used my name as a search term to demonstrate that social networking sites come up early as search results. I have also done this to show how Facebook pages show up at the top of search results.

Earlier this week, in a discussion with a local businessman about the power and benefits of social networking, I did a search in Google for my name. My site and blog came up as did my profiles in LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and Posterous. No sign of my Facebook fan page. My fan page is relatively new and I use it to share information about using social media for business. I share links to the posts others have written, I ask questions often and occasionally get responses from my 324 fans. I share the rare posts from my own blog. I started my fan page deliberately so that I would have personal experience with the positives and negatives of maintaining a Facebook page for my social media consulting business.

So I searched on a former client’s name. No Facebook fan page. Yet he has a carefully tended page with thousands of fans and his page used to come early in results from a search on his name. I then searched for Coca Cola; a well known brand with an extremely popular page. No fan page. I started to ask questions, first surreptitiously and then openly. I have tweeted, emailed and posted and no one seems to have an answer. Yet. Some of my friends offer the opinion that Google has, once again, changed its algorithms and that explains it. Or have posited that the inclusion of real-time search has changed how pages come up in search now. An SEO expert explained that I needed to write my posts differently using my page name within the post so that Google would read it and include it.

That may be the answer. We’ll see. Feels a bit awkward to include that language but it’s worth trying. However, that doesn’t explain why it used to come up and now doesn’t. My fan page, Allen Mireles Social Media Consulting or http://facebook.com/amsocialmediaconsulting, shows up in a search from within Facebook. As does my former client’s and Coca Cola’s. From outside of Facebook, however, not so much. My fan page shows up on page two of a Yahoo! search on my name (it didn’t yesterday) so that’s something. But what changed? And how much does it matter?

Oh wait! A Bing search on my name yields three references to my Facebook fan page on page one of the results. Has my fan page become a victim of dueling search engines?

What do you think? Do you have any suggestions? What am I missing here?

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Allen Mirelessocial media for business | Allen Mireles

Dell Earns Forrester Research’s Prestigious “Voice of the Customer” Award

Google Seems to Have Misplaced My Facebook Fan Page—Have You Seen It Anywhere?