What Would Google Do_ - Jeff Jarvis [4]
I just got a new Dell laptop and paid a fortune for the four-year, in-home service.
The machine is a lemon and the service is a lie.
I’m having all kinds of trouble with the hardware: overheats, network doesn’t work, maxes out on CPU usage. It’s a lemon.
But what really irks me is that they say if they sent someone to my home—which I paid for—he wouldn’t have the parts, so I might as well just send the machine in and lose it for 7–10 days—plus the time going through this crap. So I have this new machine and paid for them to FUCKING FIX IT IN MY HOUSE and they don’t and I lose it for two weeks.
DELL SUCKS. DELL LIES. Put that in your Google and smoke it, Dell.
Then something amazing happened. At first a few, then a score, then dozens and hundreds and eventually thousands of people rallied around and shouted, “What he says!” They left comments on my blog. They wrote blog posts elsewhere and linked to mine, spreading my story to thousands, perhaps millions more, and expanding Dell’s anti–fan club. They emailed me, telling me their sad sagas in excruciating detail—and some continue to email me to this day.
The tale took on a life of its own as links led to more links and to a broader discussion about blogs, customers, and companies. We bloggers decided this was a test: Was Dell reading blogs? Was it listening? Houston Chronicle tech columnist Dwight Silverman did what reporters do: He called Dell to ask for its policy on blogs. “Look, don’t touch,” was the official reply. If customers want to talk to Dell, the spokeswoman said, they should talk to the company on its site, on its terms. But Dell’s customers were already talking about Dell away from its site and control, on their own terms.
Soon, my blog posts were appearing progressively higher in Google search results for Dell, reaching the precious first page, only a few slots behind the link to Dell’s home page. The conversation about my blog post was beginning to damage Dell’s brand.
About this time, Dell’s vital signs began falling. Customer-satisfaction ratings fell. Revenue results disappointed analysts. The share price dove, eventually losing half its value from about the time this saga began. That wasn’t entirely my fault. I swear it wasn’t. Though some have given me credit or blame for cutting Dell down to size, it’s not true. I hardly did a thing. All I did was write a blog post that became a gathering point for many of my fellow frustrated Dell customers. They now stood beside me brandishing pitchforks and torches, brought together by the coalescing power of the internet, blogs, and Google. They were the people—not me—who should have been heeded by the company and by the analysts and reporters covering it. They told the real story of what was happening to Dell.
Two months after my Dell hell began, in August 2005, BusinessWeek told the tale in print. Under the headline, “Dell: In the bloghouse,” the magazine wrote:
PC industry circles have been buzzing in recent months that Dell’s customer support is slipping—a claim bolstered on Aug. 16 by a University of Michigan study that showed a hefty decline in customer satisfaction from a year ago. So the last thing Dell needed was for someone to turn the customer-service issue into a cause célèbre.
Enter Jeff Jarvis.
About this time, I managed to get a refund for my laptop, though not as the result of blogging. I had sent an email to the company’s head of marketing and, for snarky good measure, its chief ethics officer. The nice and patient lady whose job it is to talk to the irritants who get through to vice presidents called to offer help. She reached me on my mobile phone, I swear, just as I was in a computer store shopping for my Mac. She offered to exchange my computer for a