Exploding Notebook Ignites Dell's OnlinePresence?
AMD's 64 bit answer to Intel's popular Pentium M mobile chip, is now gaining popularity with a growing number of manufacturers. Can the Turion processor from Advanced Micro Devices, challenge the dominance of Intel's popular Pentium M Centrino platform?
A photo taken by an Inquirer reader has been orbiting on the Internet, something along the lines of an exploding laptop. Some would say it was onfire. Mere semantics. The picture from Osaka, captures flames and sparks andsmoke, and nearby conventioneers, perhaps dulled by beers and saki fromthe night before, staring on in disbelief and fear. The laptophappens to be a Dell, and the anticipated PR nightmare has ensued.
But besides combating the bad press surrounding this with the usualstuffy recall notices and small-font announcements on theircustomer service page, Dell is launching into theblogosphere. Beware, says the skeptic. Is this just some sort of gimmick, meant to win overcompugeeks who may otherwise turn away from Dell and toward lesscommercial notebook brands? Or will Dell's one2one blog, as it's called-turn outto be an honest attempt to reach out to its customers and formbonds with them on a more intimate, sophisticated and comfortablelevel?
Right now, if you go on the blog, it's a tough call. Plenty ofspace is devoted to posts from a "Digital Media Manager" namedLionel Menchaca or a "WW Customer Experience" director namedLaura Bosworth. And plenty of it is marketing copy that's craftedto sound informal, young, engaging and caring, such as one linethat reads "So - you wanna talk about service. Let's do it."Another post asks, "Is Dell listening?"and then quickly replies, "The answer is absolutely."
But these are professional corporate communication folks. Theseare people who know how to communicate with bloggers, generationY kids, Millennials-members of the Internet generation who aresupposedly immune to standard corporate marketing ploys andlanguage. So what would you expect?
But however you look at Dellone2one, it is working from Dell'sperspective. Folks are seemingly encouraged by the computergiant's tentative forray into the blogosphere, and are gettingpeople to respond. As Lionel, the Digital Media Manager, admitsin one of his posts, they've gotten 140 blog posts in "a healthymix of positive, negative and neutral."
And from a looksee at some of these posts, the "astute"youngsters are falling right into Dell's trap. Even when bloggersbash Dell on one2one, they end up giving Dell recommendations onhow they can improve their customer service, or evenquality-control with third-party component vendors.
Then again, I'm a cynic. Maybe Dell is being earnest.And perhaps in the process they can't help but sound likecorporate folks who are trying to sound like they're still incollege :) As for heated discussion about Dell's exploding laptopissue, that isn't going away anytime soon. Was it a batteryissue, or a design flaw? Let's hope answers will be availablesoon at DellOne2One.
August 25, 2006 - Update! - It seems the incident may not have been Dell's fault afterall, indeed the finger of blame is now being pointed at a batch of dodgy lithium ion battery packs manufactured by Sony. Apple have also recalled 1.8 million batteries, and this "Total Recall" of 6 million plus battery packs is likely to hit Sony hard in the wallet, somewhere between twenty and thirty billion yen.
