Here at Dell we have a long heritage of being direct. That includes direct communication with our customers. We have thousands of sales, support, technical and marketing team members in 130 countries talking to customers either face-to-face, over the phone or over the web.
We want to engage with our customers where they are, and with almost 500M people in Facebook, there's more than a good chance our customers are there. That includes individuals and businesses.
Despite recent backlash over Facebook's community pages and their privacy policies that led some to declare May 31 "Quit Facebook Day," we believe there is still a large audience to reach there. The results of a Mashable.com poll and number crunching from Luckie and Company indicate Quit Facebook Day's impact was minimal – .008% of their user base might have left. And, according to the latest numbers Compete.com has tracked, Facebook's reach continues to grow, probably easily compensating for any loss experienced.
We certainly aren't placing all our bets on one social network, as Jeremiah Owyang cautions companies not to do. But, like other Facebook users, we are familiar with their habit of "making adjustments on the engine as the car races around the track," as John Bell recently put it.
For quite some time we've been interacting with thousands of people around the world through Facebook, but the pages owned by Dell have not always presented a unified experience for our fans. So, we've been working to consolidate some accounts, establish internal governance and ensure we're working together to make the greatest impact for those who like our pages.
That joint effort around Dell has led to new innovations such as our Support tab that will appear on all of our official Facebook pages and allows Facebook users to request assistance from Dell Customer Support without ever leaving the social network. You can find the tab on our consumer-focused page at www.facebook.com/Dell, and now on our Dell for Business page at www.facebook.com/DellBusiness. Here's what the Dell for Business page looks like… click on the image below to go there.
This page has been created specifically to provide a new way businesses can interact with and gain insight from Dell and each other when they visit Facebook. The primary goal of the page is not to drive sales, but rather to build a relationship based on information sharing. That's not to say we won't be announcing new products or great promotions there, but gaining businesses trust is more important than generating short-term sales transactions.
So, allow me to extend a personal invitation for you all to join us in the conversation there. I will be the person behind the page, responding to your wall posts and posting our own. So, let me know what type of information would be the most helpful to you and your business!
