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Dell is a brand now well known for it’s social media success. But as some might recall, it wasn’t always like this…

In 2005 Jeff Jarvis blogged about Dell Hell and his terrible customer experience. And as it turned out, a lot of other people felt the same and it was the beginning of a very bad PR period for Dell. But they made a brilliant move: They started a social media program and began blogging. At first the blog wasn’t so well received but after they were the first to post pictures of a burning laptop at a conference they scored for being so transparent.

And in the years to follow Dell only continued the social media path further and set an example for the rest of the world. They were one of the first brands that managed to monitize Twitter and recently were the one of the first brands to open a social media listening command centre.

A what?

Their social media listening command center puts the customer in the heart of the company. Dell is using social media monitoring tool Radian6 to power its data collection. The center will track on average more than 22,000 daily topic posts related to Dell, as well as mentions of Dell on Twitter. The information can be sliced and diced based on topics and subjects of conversation, sentiment, share of voice, geography and trends.

“Our new ‘Ground Control’ is about tracking the largest number [of] possible conversations across the web and making sure we ‘internalize’ that feedback — good and bad…

You could say Dell takes this very seriously as the monitor in every country they are located and in 9 different languages. Here’s what Dell’s Vice President of Social Media and Community Manish Mehta said about their listening program he calls Ground Control:

“Dell’s Ground Control is also about getting that information to the right people wherever they are in the Dell organization, globally and functionally. It’s also about tracking what you might call the ‘long tail’… those smaller matters that might not bubble to the surface today, but are out there… and deserve to be heard.”

The center was openend by Michael Dell himself.

But listening means much more for Dell

Dell takes their listening even further with their crowdsourcing initiative Ideastorm, a platform where people can leave their ideas for improving Dell products and services. Because curation is needed to seperate the good ideas from the – not so good – ideas, people can vote on every idea. And what’s so good about this is that Dell gives real good feedback about which ideas are implemented.

According to Dell the program is such a succes that they implemented a version for employees (EmployeeStorm) and partners (PartnerStorm) as well. The program not only helps Dell to listen to the wishes of it’s customers, it drives innovation and engagement too.

Here are some staggering figures from IdeaStorm today: