Journalists’ lessons — from companies like Dell?
Richard Binhammer (Credit: www.briansolis.com via Flickr)
I came across the social media engagement report in July from Wetpaint and Altimeter focusing on how companies measure the bottom-line effectiveness of their social media efforts. The report focused on four companies — Dell, Starbucks, SAP and Toyota. The online database/website focuses on a great many more. To me, it’s not surprising that the study found…
…that the most valuable brands in the world are experiencing a direct correlation between top financial performance and deep social media engagement. The relationship is apparent and significant: socially engaged companies are in fact more financially successful. So now we know it pays to be social, but it is important to note that by “social,” we’re talking about deep engagement, not merely having a presence.
The report ranked the level of social engagement by various brands. Dell was second. That, of course, is noteworthy four years after the “Dell Hell” period, in which the company seemed to turn a deaf ear to the rage in the blogosphere over various customer service issues. Chief among the negative bloggers was Jeff Jarvis, who shared intimately his own customer service issues with Dell, and later declared an end to Dell Hell in Business Week after having an opportunity to interview Michael Dell himself and spend time at the company.
Not long after the Engagement report came out, I was offered the chance to speak to Richard Binhammer, Dell’s senior manager of corporate affairs. This was shortly after the uproar over the Washington Post’s social media guidelines for its newsroom. So it was amusing to see how open and engaged a massive company like Dell was willing to allow its employees to be. Read more
Interesting stuff I saw online, Jun. 23 to Jul. 24
Here’s some of the stuff I thought was interesting while stomping through the Internet from Jun. 23 through Jul. 24:
- Show Us the Money: How Social Media Engagement is Paying Off – Blog – Standing Partnership – "Those brands that were the most engaged saw their revenue grow over the past year by 18% while the least engaged brands saw losses of negative 6%."
- News Websites in Texas and Kentucky Invoke Shield Laws for Online Commenters – "This week brings word of two new cases testing whether state shield laws apply to user comments posted on news websites."
- CNN’s iReport attracts nearly 4,000 submissions on Iranian elections | Journalism.co.uk Editors’ Blog – The role of amateurs has been significant in coverage of the Iranian elections.
- Four crowdsourcing lessons from the Guardian’s (spectacular) expenses-scandal experiment Nieman Journalism Lab – "Journalism has been crowdsourced before, but it’s the scale of the Guardian’s project — 170,000 documents reviewed in the first 80 hours, thanks to a visitor participation rate of 56 percent — that’s breathtaking."
Kurt's Tweets- Funny. SW airlines magazine bothers to mention that pacemakers are always authorized electronic devices. #fb
- A disgrace, St. Louis. People still litter? http://post.ly/OUsk
- Redemption for Lindsey Jacobellis in snowboardcross? Only click if you really wanna know. http://bit.ly/99OgbM
- West Countians: If you're in the market for a pancake supper tonight, there's one here: http://stmartinschurch.org.
- The fiddling continues, even as Rome burns.