Shel Israel has another great interview this time with Richard Binhammer, Director of Corporate Communications at Dell.

Richard talks about how they had become detached from their customers and suffered the loss of their number 1 position. They have been working hard over the last two years to use social media to help engage with their customer base. They have made mistakes, learnt and come back again the stronger for it. Richard talks about how listening and then acting on customer feedback has reduced negative sentiment by over 50%. Listening he feels is key.

Whilst ROI measurement is needed it is not the only driving force behind their strategy. Having customer communication pipelines via social media tools and knowing who is saying what about you online could be considered basic business needs.

Richard also comments on how they identified, tracked and analysed what the online community was saying about them. Whilst they are looking at a richer set of online reputation tracking and management tools much of it is still 'cut,paste and manually analyse'.