Back in July of last year, Steve posted about Jeff Jarvis and his Dell Problem. To recap: Jeff experienced some serious problems with his Dell machine and, after receiving truly inadequate tech support, posted about his “Dell Hell” problem on his blog - which happens to have a Google PageRank of 8.
Jeff’s experience quickly poisoned the waters for Dell. But Dell didn’t respond. Instead, they did what you are never ever ever supposed to do. They stonewalled.
In December, industry analyst Onalytica published a white paper that showed Jeff Jarvis as having a disproportionately high influence over public perceptions of Dell’s customer service. We blogged about the paper and posted a timeline of our other observations of the “Dell Hell” controversy.
Now, it appears that The New York Times has caught on to the perception of Dell’s foibles. Last week, NYT tech columnist David Pogue gave his column over to retired tech geek John Stumpf so he could share his hilarious, snarky account of dealing with Dell’s offshore customer service.
Dell’s public relations office responded to Pogue. He discusses the contents of the e-mail - and many positive reader comments backing up the story’s authenticity - in this week’s column. Needless to say, Dell did not come out of this one smelling remotely rosy.
The lesson: Don’t stonewall the blogosphere. Ever. If Dell had responded to Jeff Jarvis in the same way that they responded to the Times perhaps they could have nipped their image problem in the bud - while the problem was still in Jarvis’ hands. But because they stonewalled, the problem has snowballed. (Hey! That rhymes!). It’s now fully present and represented in the mainstream media, in pop culture, and in people’s consciousness.
The idea has become so deeply imbedded that people who have never heard of Jeff Jarvis are now using the phrase “Dell Hell.” I called a friend who is still in college a few days ago to ask why she hadn’t been on Instant Messenger and to make sure she was OK. She said her computer crashed and that she was in “Dell Hell.”
“That’s what I get for being cheap and buying a Dell,” she said. “Everyone knows they’re not good computers.”
I asked her if she knew where the expression originated and she said, “No. I guess someone just made it up because it rhymes and sounds clever. But I’ve heard my friends say it too.”
When people are using a phrase and they don’t know where it came from, it’s a meme. And when your company is the subject of a negative meme, you have a real problem.
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