Yesterday I wrote fairly extensively about Whole Food’s presence on Twitter, making regular references back to the 2×2 Twitter Brand Engagement Matrix I’d developed a few weeks ago when discussing their many different accounts. Another company I’ve been looking at fairly extensively is Dell, which has roughly 50 different accounts operating on Twitter. As part of my presentation on Twitter for our 2.0 conference last week I put a bunch of them into the matrix, and talked in some detail about how the various different accounts appear to be being used. Here’s what it looked like, including call out bubbles to show which some of the most popular accounts are (stats pulled a week or two ago):
There’s a lot of interesting things that can come out of looking at Dell’s presence on Twitter through this lens. While I don’t have time today to go into great detail (um, it turns out I had more time than I thought, as you will see…), here’s a few that jumped off the page for me:
- The Primary Account still matters the most. In yesterday’s discussion, I pointed out that Whole Food’s primary twitter account had something like 50x more followers than the rest of their accounts combined. The story with Dell is slightly less dramatic, but similar. At last check DellOutlet was now up over 520,000 followers, with the next closest competitor still under 7,000. So again, while I think an integrated approach is important for the future, the primary account should continue to get the majority of focus in the near-term.
- The next most popular accounts are all over the matrix. After DellOutlet, it goes to RichardatDell in the personality+conversation corner, then over to DellSmallBiz in brand+broadcast, then back to DigitalNomads in brand+conversation (which upon further review, I think might actually be in the brand+broadcast corner), then over to ChrisBatDell in Personality+Broadcast (though noting a more recent glance at Chris’ account indicates he’s been moving into the more conversation quadrant). Different approaches can be used for different objectives… and as my bracketed comments indicate things move around here.
- Dell is represented in many different ways. No need to get scientific here – pretty easy to see that it’s a different experience / brand message connecting with an Outlet, to connecting with Richard, to connecting with a SmallBiz information source, to connecting with GGroovin, to connecting with DellServerGeek, to connecting with an Alien, to connecting with a cat (T0dd). Many companies would be scared of this – but I like it.
- Dell is fostering connections between brand and personality accounts. Though I didn’t include it in the diagram, Dell is clearly making connections between brand accounts on twitter, and particular people behind them. For example, check out the @DellOutlet account – the profile clearly says it’s managed by Stefanie, who operates out of that personality/conversation quadrant. Similarly, Anthony is behind the Home Offers account, Kara is behind Small Biz, etc.
- Dell IdeaStorm has only 626 followers. I didn’t include it in the matrix, but that’s what it has. Managed by @JackieatDell, the tweets are all “[Latest Idea] – whatever the idea the community generated is.” I find it interesting that this particular account isn’t more popular, given the amount of (well-deserved) press the IdeaStorm site has received in terms of prosumer engagement. In contrast, Digital_Nomads For those whose work or play is defined by what, not where!) is now up near 3,000 followers. I would reserve the right to think about this and come back to it at another time.
- Naming conventions are all over the map. Again, similar to WholeFoods – it appears that (name)atdell was the preferred approached, but there have been lots of others taken as well.
That’s just a taste of some things I found interesting – and there are a myriad of questions, insights, and hypotheses that can be pulled out from merely scanning the various profiles and how they’re used on the site so far (some good, some bad, some just interesting). For the heck of it, here’s some other things I noticed while I’m on a roll:
- When I looked at Dell a few months ago the main account had “only” 145,000 followers – yet it has grown at a faster rate than all of the other accounts (normally one might expect smaller accounts to grow faster).
- Daily tweets ranged from zero to 92.5, depending on the account. The average was 4.4, dragged down by a lot of inactive accounts.
- Conversation index scores ranged from 0% to 100%, with different accounts falling everywhere in between. While the MOST popular were conversational, a lot of more broadcast-centric accounts were near the top of the list as well. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m NOT in the camp that thinks broadcast is bad.
- Some seemed to follow everyone back, some followed basically no one back – always an interesting trend to watch.
- Though I haven’t proven this so take it with more of a grain of salt then the other stuff, my perception is the brand accounts are becoming more and broadcast focused, and the personality accounts are becoming more and more conversation centric. Which I think is a good thing – particularly for the DellOutlet account – when it comes to potential business impact. I know I’m not the only one that gets overwhelmed by accounts that I follow for one reason (say, information on upcoming deals), and get back something else (say, a whole bunch of @ replies).
- There’s a TeamDell account that appears to have only one function (following other Dell team members, hasn’t been updated in a year, but has almost 1,000 followers.
- If you go through the list on TeamDell, 3 of the first 4 people on it have combined for a total of one tweet, and a lot of accounts are basically dead. So while I personally now that Dell is one of the most active and interesting companies on Twitter, if I so happened to stumble upon the TeamDell account as my “introduction” to their team I likely wouldn’t believe the company is authentically engaged. Just something to watch out for.
So now that I’ve made somewhat of a mockery of the notion of being too short on time to write much, I’ll leave it at that for now – and just say that for companies looking to develop an integrated Twitter strategy, Dell is an interesting organization to watch. At some point I might even structure my thoughts about them into something a little more coherent 
.
