I hope Rick Segal won’t mind my quoting this in entirety but it’s too wonderful a postscript to my Dell saga (which isn’t quite over but will be momentarily, a coda to follow):
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. ;-)]
That lunch is on me, Rick.
