Foundation for Marketing: Social Media

Application of Marketing Principles by Dell through Social Media

One of the major marketing principles which are being adopted by most of the successful companies across the world is: Creating Customer Value and Relationships. Even Dell does so by developing innovative customer-value and customer-relationships framework for capturing the basic essence of marketing in today’s time (Kotler and Armstrong, 2008).This is done by Dell in many ways through utilizing the social media platforms of various kinds:Creating value for the customers so that in return value can be captured form the customers.

It attracts its targeted customers through strong value propositions like competitive pricing for the Dell laptops and PCs which are highly enviable for competitors. Then they keep growing and maintaining their customer base through excellent and prompt customer service to deliver prompt and superior customer value. With the help of Facebook or Twitter they are able to maintain the company-customer interface in excellent manner.

Harnessing New marketing technologies

Dell has been the earliest adopter of the social media technology amongst the other companies and it spends around $750,000 per year on social media only based upon the analysis done by Bain and Company. Research has shown that early adaptors like Dell have gained real economic value form their social media investments (Barry et al., 2011).

The company Dell’s founder Michael Dell realized the power of online social engagement and that is why its current marketing strategy is based upon the customer-centric and direct-selling Model of Dell. This way the Company is able to respond promptly to the customer service issues also.

Source: (Dell, 2012)

This has helped Dell to expand its social media efforts in multiple directions in order to increase its revenue as well as retain its loyal customers too (Barry et al., 2011). Moreover the feedback generated through social media is being used by Dell to enhance its products along with resolving the customer service also. Finally Dell uses almost all the marketing principles activate the promoters and acquisition of new customers through social media platforms (Barry et al., 2011).

Utilizing Various Social Media Platforms to Engage and Inform Customers/ Employees a/ Stakeholders

Social media is all about reaching out to other businesses and people utilizing the most advanced Web 2.0 technologies which help in:

• Building virtual relationships
• Allowing the masses to gain knowledge about your company (Uys, 2010)

Some of the basic segments which include social media are categorized below in Figure 1:

Figure 1: Segmentation of Social Media (Uys, 2010)

In the social media circles companies like Dell are well-known and especially because of the uproar as they sold almost $6.5 million in the year 2009 through social media only (Uys, 2010). Check out the web link: http://en.community.dell.com/blogs/direct2dell/archive/2009/12/08/expanding-connections-with-customers-through-social-media.aspx

Being the early mover in the social media space, first of all Dell started off with Blog Page. It was done to connect and respond to the customers.

 Then IdeaStorm was created, which was the brightest way of getting involved with the customers in Innovation. Then the social media moved to social blogging through Twitter and social networking through Facebook. Next step was building a Flickr Page which recently touched a one million views mark. Following this step was  the YouTube channel which covered the Social Video or photo sharing of Dell which was produced for Dierct2Dell (Shaw, Dibeehi and Walden, 2010).

Source: (Dell, 2012)

 Dierct2Dell facilitates and promotes an active way of interacting with customers for the company leaders. On the other hand IdeaStorm helps the ideas which have been crowd-sourced and also the customers to avail the opportunity to collaborate and prioritise the product and deliver improved services to the customers. Thus Social Media plays a key role in Dell’s Customer Engagement Strategy.

 Future Trends in Social Media to engage the Audience

The future tools or approach in social media which can be used for engaging the audience in Dell can be:

Capturing attention of “Young and Mobile” segment of social media. They can be reached through micro-blogs and location-based games. Another tool which can be used is to convert the det6ractors to promoters of Dell products (Barry et al., 2011). Dell can also promote and hoist events for the ‘Influencer’ who is hyper-connected individuals who have very huge clout online. This can be done effectively through special online recognition, permitting them to try and test your products and hosting special online chats for them exclusively.

Source: (Dell, 2012)

 Dell can also use engagement metrics by installing their own social media monitoring software which should have a dashboard of major metrics like media campaign performance, customer interactions and brand discussions (Barry et al., 2011).

Source: (Dell, 2012)

This has helped Dell to expand its social media efforts in multiple directions in order to increase its revenue as well as retain its loyal customers too (Barry et al., 2011). Moreover the feedback generated through social media is being used by Dell to enhance its products along with resolving the customer service also. Finally Dell uses almost all the marketing principles activate the promoters and acquisition of new customers through social media platforms (Barry et al., 2011).

Utilizing Various Social Media Platforms to Engage and Inform Customers/ Employees a/ Stakeholders

Social media is all about reaching out to other businesses and people utilizing the most advanced Web 2.0 technologies which help in:

·         Building virtual relationships

·         Allowing the masses to gain knowledge about your company (Uys, 2010)

Some of the basic segments which include social media are categorized below in Figure 1:

 In the social media circles companies like Dell are well-known and especially because of the uproar as they sold almost $6.5 million in the year 2009 through social media only (Uys, 2010). Check out the web link: http://en.community.dell.com/blogs/direct2dell/archive/2009/12/08/expanding-connections-with-customers-through-social-media.aspx

Being the early mover in the social media space, first of all Dell started off with Blog Page. It was done to connect and respond to the customers.

 Then IdeaStorm was created, which was the brightest way of getting involved with the customers in Innovation. Then the social media moved to social blogging through Twitter and social networking through Facebook. Next step was building a Flickr Page which recently touched a one million views mark. Following this step was  the YouTube channel which covered the Social Video or photo sharing of Dell which was produced for Dierct2Dell (Shaw, Dibeehi and Walden, 2010).

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Source: (Dell, 2012)

 Dierct2Dell facilitates and promotes an active way of interacting with customers for the company leaders. On the other hand IdeaStorm helps the ideas which have been crowd-sourced and also the customers to avail the opportunity to collaborate and prioritise the product and deliver improved services to the customers. Thus Social Media plays a key role in Dell’s Customer Engagement Strategy.

 Future Trends in Social Media to engage the Audience

The future tools or approach in social media which can be used for engaging the audience in Dell can be:

Capturing attention of “Young and Mobile” segment of social media. They can be reached through micro-blogs and location-based games. Another tool which can be used is to convert the det6ractors to promoters of Dell products (Barry et al., 2011). Dell can also promote and hoist events for the ‘Influencer’ who is hyper-connected individuals who have very huge clout online. This can be done effectively through special online recognition, permitting them to try and test your products and hosting special online chats for them exclusively.

 Dell can also use engagement metrics by installing their own social media monitoring software which should have a dashboard of major metrics like media campaign performance, customer interactions and brand discussions (Barry et al., 2011).