Memo to Dell - Jeff Jarvis does matter

I work in an office tower with standard food courts all filled with people like me; complaining about prices but too lazy to make our lunch at home.

I happened to be sitting across from a couple of bank tellers from TD Canada Trust, the bank in our building.  These two ladies I'd seen before so I knew where they worked.

Lady one: I was going to buy a new Dell but did you hear about Jeff Jarvis and the absolute hell he is going through with them.

Lady two: Yeah, I know the IT guy told me that the cobler blog was recommending we stay away from Dell.

Okay, after you are done laughing at this; laughing at Scoble's name being mangled, laughing at two random bank tellers talking about some one line blog entry about some guy pissed off about his Dell experience; after you are done: Pay Attention.

I'll accept that an IT guy would be reading scoble's blog.  I'll even accept the IT guy offering an opinion which, randomly, I overheard.

The pay attention part: Lots of people (Dell?) are making the assumption that "average people" or "the masses" don't really see/read blogs so, we take a little heat and move on.

Big mistake.

That interchange probably cost Dell at least two sales and lord only knows how many over time. And those lost sales are coming from a feedback system that didn't matter a few years ago.

This "blogging stuff" is moving mainstream seriously fast. You and your management team had better be watching what's going on because Jeff Jarvis and Aunt Mildred both have blogs and both can call BS on whatever BS you are serving up.

[Side note: I don't think Scoble ever said don't buy Dell as the Redmond OEM Mafia would have him killed. ;-)]

Comments

[Matt]

One might note also that, even if tomorrow Dell were to somehow make Jeff Jarvis happy with them again, those two sales (and the sales of everyone they happened to talk about PCs with) would still be lost forever.

Bad news has been able to circle the world in minutes for ages now. The new thing is that it can penetrate remarkably deeply at the same speed. Fixing PR blunders after they're loose is still just as hard.

All the more reason to _really_ care about customer service from the beginning.

[Nathan]

Remember the lifespan of Internet-borne memes, too. I haven't seen the Craig Shergold message in a while, but it circulated for *years*.

[frosty]

Also think about this: with enough Aunt Mildreds and better ways of finding information, screwing over your *average* customer is going to come back at you with a lot more force than the Jarvis episode.

No disrespect to Jarvis, but if my Aunt Mildred is thinking of buying a Dell and twenty other Aunt Mildreds say she shouldn't, that means something much more significant to Aunt M. than if a high-profile but un-Mildred-like blogger says the same thing.

And I do believe things are heading that way.

[richard]

For a minte I thought we worked in the same building for a second; 'cept I'm in the main TD building in Vancouver...

Blogs don't necessarily help or hinder the spread of stories about bad products or bad experiences with companies; email and traditional web searches are still valid forms; it's just that the RSS spread of these things is more passive on the poster's part.

[Reid]

There's an old business phrase, from long before the Internet ... "Make a customer happy, and he'll tell a friend. Make a customer angry, and he'll tell ten friends."

Today's digital reality multiplies that by a couple of orders of magnitude.