Social Media is Core to Dell’s Marketing Strategy! (video)

Earlier this week, at Dell’s business notebook launch event in San Francisco, I spoke with Andy Lark (pictured) who runs the computer maker’s corporate marketing about its communication strategy.

And not to sound too pessimistic for my colleagues in the “traditional” media but social media and blogging is at the core of Dell’s marketing strategy, with a dedicated “social media” team to engage with blogs, wikis, twitter, customers, forums/IdeaStorm, etc.

“The social media stuff is probably the most important we do today, from a marketing stand point. The other elements of marketing mix has sort of become more and more transactional and more and more tactical in nature. Social media stuff is much more strategic… Use social media to power the fundamental of the business. That’s what we’re focused on”.

I also found Lark’s opinion on “traditional” and “new” media quite interesting. Dell’s marketing guru does not believe there’s such thing as traditional media anymore, a notion that was “killed a while ago”.

But there is media that are going out of business pretty soon because they fail to evolve their business model sufficiently and there are media that don’t need to evolve their business model because they are media establishments and have such a status “in the general flow of information” (Wall Steet Journal et al).

“The information that I’m giving you is the asset not the translation of it!”

Lark also is looking to use more crowd-sourcing tools like Facebook apps (Graffiti…) in Dell’s advertising campaigns, cutting in agency fees and such.

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