 Okay, we're back here live at Dell World 2012, Austin, Texas. This is siliconangle.com's TV program, The Cube, our flagship telecast. We go out to the events, extract the signal from the noise, and we're excited to be here at Dell World, just exciting transformations of company. Obviously on the computing side, solution side, but also the digital media side. Dell has been pioneering some killer work, and Michael Dell, as I always say, we have big ears at Dell, it looks to the customer, and we're going to dig deep into some of the coolness around the digital marketing, what their vision is, and really how this is changing given the nature of a connected society with mobile devices, social networks. We're at the beginning of a revolution. We're seeing it on Twitter, we're seeing it on Facebook, so I'm really excited. I'm John Furrier, the founder of siliconangle.com, and I'm joined by my co-host. I'm Dave Vellante of wikibond.org, and John, seven years ago, CIO said to me, I love white papers, and I said, what, you love white papers? He said, yeah, because I know the sales call's over when I get a white paper. And the thing I learned from that conversation is that marketing has to be a source of value, particularly to CIOs. So we're here with Rishi Davei, who's the executive director of business digital marketing at Dell, and we're going to talk about how Dell is making marketing a source of value for its community. Rishi, welcome. Thank you, thank you for having me. Good to see you. So we've just been walking around the floor, we've seen some of the things that you're doing with your websites, the TechPage One initiative that you guys have launched. You heard my intro here. Marketing as a source of value. You seem to be taking that philosophy. Talk about that a little bit. Yeah, absolutely. What we're doing is we're really thinking about what CIOs want and what our IT customers want. And what they want is great thought leadership. And they want great content. And they want to know what the latest and greatest things that are happening, and they want our perspective on that content. And so when we think about social media marketing, we think first about great content. And how do we create great content? How do we stream it to our customers? How do we make sure we're there to have the conversation around that content with our customers? And then frankly, how do we get an ROI from that conversation as well? So when we think about all those three things in the social space, and that's the big thing that companies are focusing on now is that last couple of years was all about what's my Twitter strategy, what's my Facebook strategy, et cetera. What companies are finding now is that the real thing that they need to figure out is what is their content strategy? Because most companies do not have the ability to fill up this 24 seven pipe that they have with their customers. And the people who know how to do that are people like you guys, the journalists. So brands are becoming publishers. They're trying to figure out how they get content out on their key areas 24 seven. And how do they engage in conversations around that content? And the TechPageOne initiative is one of the big ways we're doing that. Rishi, you know, we are obviously aligned with your philosophy. I mean, theCUBE here, SiliconANGLE, Wikibon, we're an open source media company. We don't run banner ads on our website. We don't have any kind of grab, walled garden, grab you in. Because the action's happening in the crowd. And this is really what I want to talk to you about in this segment is that, you know, the old way was Google made sense of the web, draw a lot of people to it, and they had ads, you click on them, you go to a landing page. That era seems to be sliding away given the SEO pollution and the lack of relevance. But now the people are involved. The people being Twitter, Facebook, they're all connected and talking to us. So peer review has always been something that we've been interested in. And, you know, we built a business around it because the more content that's out there, the more people are connecting. And it's now measurable, right? So for the first time in history, the aspect of customer connections are instrumentable. You could actually instrument these conversations, these relationships, grab insight out of that. So you guys are doing a lot of that on the floor here. So I want to get your perspective on that. Why do you think that's so important and what specific things do you guys see happening right now that you're capturing on in terms of converting it to business value, AKA either customer satisfaction, listening to customer's needs, and ultimately sales? Yeah, so I think that, you know, stepping back on that one, what is the value of social? So I think that many people think of social as purely a marketing phenomenon. And I think you're alluding to the fact that it's a lot more than that. And there's a lot of different measurements you can use. So, you know, what we focus a lot on at Dell is it's not about social marketing, it's about being a social business. And when you're a social business, then you use social for so much more than marketing. And you measure it in so many more ways. So for example, obviously there's measurements we all know, like is it driving lead generation for me? Is it driving sales in my e-commerce store? But we use social to get product feedback from customers. So we have this thing called IdeaStorm.com where we simply ask customers to submit product feedback. We ask them to vote on each other's feedback and we have a prioritized list of feedback for our engineers at any given time. So we get product feedback. You know, we're starting to do more and more customer research. Traditionally, we use a focus group or we'd use some other traditional means. Now we just do it in social. We do it online. Real time. Real time. You know, we recruit a lot of most of our people through LinkedIn, through other social channels. So, you know, it pervades everything. If you think about the disruption involved, I mean, just what you just said, research, panels, the old way, go get a panel house, get some panel data, poke a group, get it in six weeks, get it in nine weeks. Yeah, yeah, from those seven people, right? Get a statistically relevant sample. Now you can go and get a actual sample of thousands of people. Absolutely. And you can adjust on the fly. Yeah, yeah. So big data, is that a part of that? Because I noticed some of the things you're doing here, you're aggregating data sources. Can you talk about some of the insights that you're doing with your digital tools that you're offering? Oh, so big data is a big part of it. So I talked about the traditional measurements. Did I get a lead? Did I sell something in my store, et cetera? But in addition to that, we use big data analytics to determine the value of what we do in social. So let me give you an example. Delltechcenter.com, our technical community. We absolutely mind that data and we look at the patterns of behavior and that data and what happens offline. So we may see that a certain aggregate number of customers, they look at a bunch of storage content and then those same customers end up buying storage offline. So when we see new customers or new people come in our community following that same pattern, then we can use that data to go to our sales team and say, hey, did you know that these customers might be doing this? They may be interested in storage. Next time you talk to them, you may want to talk more about storage in these particular areas because we know that they're fundamentally interested in it. So that whole, that's what big data does, is that it allows us, it's unstructured data, but we can mine it, get the PhD nerds on there, get them to look at the patterns and then use that to predict behavior. And then the fundamental interface with our sales team is different as well. It's no longer just traditional CRM. You slice and dice the data. You say, hey, here's a predictive model of the probability that each of your customers is going to buy each of these products based on what we see them doing social. And again, that's all changing. It's the future, no doubt. Obviously we're hardcore with you on that. The question I want to ask you on the business model side is obviously we've been involved in social in the beginning with you guys and we're watching you guys. So the web creates a direct business model. So one of the things about social was it really kind of came out of the PR industry. Oh, listen to your customers because communications pros, they see them, they understand that dynamic, but it's really impacting the advertising because now the 50% of your advertising that you don't know what's going to waste now kind of goes away because you can take a direct business model by being your own publisher, talking directly to the customers. Coca-Cola used this moment with the hot companies in San Francisco that provides a direct platform, run a concert, spend all that money and see direct instrumentation of the efforts. Can you talk about one? Are you guys there with that and vision-wise? And what ROI type discussions go on? Is it return on objectives? Is it ROI based on the data? Because the ROI thing has been this elusive thing, like people justifying their jobs and it really comes down to did something get paid for work. So talk about the direct business model and then talk about these new ROI phenomenons and the amount of models. So yeah, the direct business model has been phenomenal for us. Our ability to measure to the nth degree what we're doing now. So to take what you said to the next level, like even with traditional marketing, so even if we do billboard advertising, even if we do airport advertising, whatever, we can measure it now because we can send people from that advertising to our social channels, to our digital properties and measure that they came from that and look at the behavior they did and I could say that billboard generated direct pipeline of $100 million or whatever. And so therefore we should invest more in that. So the instrumentation and the analytics and the amount of PhD, analytics, people you need and the analytics tools you need has gone up and is a tremendous way to measure everything you do in marketing. What do you mean it's gone up? Do you mean the need for those personnel or is those skills? Yeah, the need to have those skills, the need to look at those analytics. Data science. Data science. It's the money ball of marketing, right? It's the money ball of phenomenon in marketing. And so social has enabled that and so it's not just about the social channel anymore, all marketing because of the social phenomenon allows you to numerically see what you're doing. So I love the money ball reference. I want to ask you, so how do you stay ahead of the curve? So coming back to the money ball, which is groundbreaking right now everybody does it. So how do you stay ahead of the pack? I mean, you're dealt clearly in our opinion is ahead of the game. How do you maintain that competitive advantage? The biggest thing that we do is embed social in the kind of fabric of the day to day happenings of people's jobs. And that is something that has helped us get ahead. So to the point earlier, most people look at social as it's a PR thing or a comms thing. Or social is something that will hire like five great interns to take care of. Or it's an experiment. Yeah, it's an experiment. Or we'll get five interns with tattoos to do it, right? And what we're seeing is that, and we took that model early on, where we had this centralized set of highly intelligent social experts. What you see us doing now, and we've been doing over the last few years, is we're moving that more to the edge of the company to the people as part of the day to day job. So the engineers, the product people, the product managers, you know, people way beyond sales and marketing. CEO. CEO, yeah, well he was the first one there. So I can't use that example. Social is part of that. And so part of the day to day lives. And again, it doesn't happen by happenstance. We forcefully make it happen culturally. So let me give you another example. You know, what we're doing now, and I believe it's totally groundbreaking, is we talk about social media training. And everyone talks about that now. But what we do is we say, okay, who are our employee journalists, or who should be our employee journalists? Who are our experts, engineers, and let's say, storage? Now how do we take that expert engineer in storage and take them from zero social presence to being one of the most influential people in storage on the web? And we are building programs to handhold that person from what I call zero to hero. And that requires, that's IP, that's a skill that we've developed over time, and that's something that's very unique. And if we can get all those engineers, all those experts who, frankly, they're the ones customers want to talk to, not me, the marketing guy, and we can take them from zero to, you know, the most influential in the space on the web, and handhold them through that process, then we've lived the whole company. So take us through. So I want to ask a follow up on that. So you said earlier, brands are creating original content. Yes. There's a way to do that and there's a wrong way to do that. And so so many brands, you see, oh, this is why we're great. This is, you know, someone comes on their TV and says, tell us why we're great. You know, and it's just not really useful, not of value. So talk about your philosophy in that regard. Definitely. So the way we look at content is almost like a portfolio theory of content. So here's what I mean. When you look at social content, it's not just about pure original pieces. So there's obviously original content you create. And to your point, it's not just about me, me, me, me, me, right? It's original content and thought leadership and your perspective. Where's the future? What's going on? How should you approach things? So there's that. But you also spend as much time curating great content that's already out there, bringing it together for your customers and putting your perspective on there. So you have original content. You have curated content where you say here are five great pieces on storage. And here's our opinion on those pieces. We recycle content all the time. So we may see a piece go viral and we may say that these other four platforms that could use that content. It's not about owning the content, being like this, that's mine. I'm a publisher today. Most people will act like that today. There's my content. I'm not going to link to my competitor. So that's kind of the anti-social. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. So linking and community distribution is what you want. You want frictionless content to roll. And it's not just my original content. It's other people's content. It's relevant to the customer or the user, right? And then the funny thing about that is when you're building that portfolio of content for your customer and they're loving you for it, then you have the permission to do what you describe. Talk about yourself. Yeah, right. You've earned that. You've earned that. You have to earn it. So once you've earned it, you can do it. In communities, it's all about endorsement and earning, right? Absolutely. Getting that endorsement. Okay, great. So talk about communities, right? Obviously, communities are an important part of it. Community strategy is kind of like, oh, it's community. Communities are very difficult. They're very fickle. Like you said, they're hard to penetrate, hard to align with. Most marketers come in and they just hand wave, hey, we're going to go out and talk to the customers. So one, how do you look at communities? And two, sometimes when you walk into a community, you might not like what you hear, right? So most marketers have never had that experience of actually having an opportunity to actually hear directly from the customers, all of them. So talk about communities, the dynamics of communities today and I don't necessarily like what I hear. Does that have to come, how do you close that, get looped that back into the system? Yeah, yeah, you know, we have to accept that. So the first step is acceptance, right? Is that we have to accept that we are willing to hear both the positive and negatives of what our customers say. And we even take that to the end degree where we actually bring in the biggest detractors and the biggest positive people. We care about both those type of people because they provide value to us and sometimes we'll physically bring them in the del to talk to us. You can learn, you can learn. Because you can learn a ton. So I think you have to accept that as you start the social marketing process, you're going to get very negative feedback. You're going to get very positive feedback. You're going to have people who are going to be your biggest advocates, but you also have people who are going to be biggest detractors. To make it that successful, it's all about how you approach that and how you approach those people, right? If you choose not to blow off the detractors and listen to what they say and respond intelligently, which is the way we do it, and embrace their feedback, then you get a lot of respect from those detractors as well as from your overall customer base and community in general. And so we took a very open, honest, direct, nobody's opinion is not worth listening to approach. And that helped us really grow the community and we didn't edit it. And we didn't edit anybody's content. So that was very powerful for us from a community perspective. We passed through that. It's important. I mean, it's one of those times, like I said, I'm a big believer that, you know, I've talked to a VP of marketing and they're like, I go, you know, have you ever talked to your customers? I mean, you know, like, do you know who you're targeting? And sometimes it's just blind shooting these arrows into the darkness. Oh, yes. And, you know, I ask direct questions. Like, what's your target sector? What's the, give me some demographics, like a graphic profile. Do you know that? Like, they're like, they're afraid because they don't have the systems and processes in place. So a lot of folks out there just don't have those processes to handle this. So what can you share with the folks out there that are looking at this thing? You know, I want to get to where Rishi's team is. What are some of the process things I can do quickly? And how can I build a foundation to enable a social business? Yeah, a couple of things. One is, I think, and this may seem simple, but you absolutely have to start with what is your content strategy? What is your core messaging as a company? You know, that's typically the question I ask people when they ask me that question is that what are the big content areas that you want to focus on that you feel you're differentiated and what is your differentiated viewpoint that customers care about? So once you have that, then it's kind of like, who's going to be the, who's going to build your content around that? You know, who's going to talk about that in social and where are you going to amplify that? And then the last piece I say is start small, right? Regardless of what industry you're in, there's going to be a few platforms that dominate your industry. Like in the hotel industry, we all go to the same one or two, three platforms. So start with those platforms, start putting your content in there, start listening to what your customers are saying in those small platforms, start engaging, and then scale it up from there. So, you know, I think those are kind of few things is that you have to have a strategy, you have to have the content and people that actually create against that strategy and then you have to start small and go where the majority of customers are, 80, 20, and then expand from there. So you said that sounds simple. Yeah, it's not. In particular, in Dell's case, that couldn't have been simple, complex company. Right. So how did you start, where did you start and what is the fundamental mainspring of your content strategy? Yeah, so the way we do it is, we have a very robust kind of messaging hierarchy. You even see that this conference, like here are the five, six big themes we're going to focus on, here are the core messaging around those themes and then it kind of goes down from there and then we kind of, we build content around those themes and then we allow customers to pick and choose what they're interested in. We look at the analytics of what customers are interested in. So I'll give an example. Historically, in our technical community, we've seen a huge increase in customers asking about systems management. So we have really ramped up the systems management content on our tech center community. Virtualization is another one. So again, it's all customer driven. What are customers asking about? What are they actually reading? What content is going viral? And then we know what to invest in and what to de-invest in as well. It's all back to the analytics. That's so important because we know from our own analytics and our own tooling that the dissonance between what, oftentimes the vendor community is saying or the buyer community is saying is a big gap there. And so you're able to use your analytics to identify that and drive a content strategy around it. No, exactly. And one of the biggest challenges I have, which is almost funny, is that because I'm in social marketing, I'm driven by what customers are asking for and what the analytics say. But that may be vastly different from what Dell wants to say. Dell has a campaign strategy. They have a tops down here, the five messages. And the customers may be saying, well, you know this week, all I care about is systems management and virtualization. And I don't want to talk storage this week or nobody's really interested or whatever. But Dell does. So matching all that stuff is a delicate dance. Yeah, so there's obviously the virtuous cycle here where your team is feeding back and the analytics team is feeding into that. But then you've got, like you say, you've got tactical marketing initiatives and people with budget saying we're doing this. So it is a balance. Talk about your vision for your organization, this event, you know, it's second year. You got to be happy with that. Let's talk about that a little bit. Where do you see it all going? Yeah, so my vision is really around getting this great content. So we have five themes here at Dell World which you've probably talked about. My vision is saying how do we create great content along those five themes? And how do we deliver it to the customer in a customized way in the way that they want it? Then how do we engage in real conversation with our customers around that content? So at Dell World, you know, we have a whole social aspect where we can do that. But even after Dell World, we want to continue those conversations. And the last piece is how do we make sure that that content and conversation results in a ROI for our sales team? Where we can get lead generation and things like that and get direct pipeline from that whole process. So my vision for next year is really all oriented around great content and getting great content around our big messaging to customers. And it's no longer about my Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn strategy, because that's the easy part now. The hard part is getting the right stuff and figuring out what platform will get me to the right customer. Yeah, I mean we're just hardcore on this and we've been doing about two and a half years where the research and development around, especially the Twitter data, because we like Twitter because it's an observation space. But you got different data, like LinkedIn and other social networks that also provide different unique values. So we love it. And to me, it's all about getting the right person, whether it's a storage expert, in the right place at the right time, because in a real time environment, the crowd, if you misfire, it's easy to misfire. So we're totally with you. So my final question is that you guys are now selling the services as a process. I want you to talk about that but also I want you to talk about how the evolution of Dell.com is going because the website's changed marketing forever, but now we're in an interactive, connected real time environment. The website is I guess a launching pad of content missiles, whatever you want to call it. So has it changed the website? Yep. Programming and also analytics, how you're measuring and so on. So I think what you're going to see with the Dell.com website is on the one hand massive simplification, because it's obviously, like you said, one, a complex business and we sum everyone, a large set of customers. So on one hand it's simplification, on the other hand it's a socialization. So making content less static and more dynamic, because we know if you don't have dynamic content, nobody's going to keep coming back. But if you have dynamic content, the people will keep coming back without you having to spend incremental marketing money to do that. So you scale your marketing funding, which you never could do before. So. Yeah, every improvement costs money. Yeah, every improvement costs money and if it's static, then you run a static campaign, then the customer goes away and then you run another static campaign and the customer goes away. When you have dynamic content, customer comes in, they see content and they keep coming back for new content and cool content. And then they share it and then that audience grows over time and I don't spend incremental money to do that. So you'll see a move from simplification and then a socialization of the website. Tech page one is a great example of that, where we took our static content and we moved to a totally dynamic streaming model and that's part of Dell.com. And that was groundbreaking. We broke a sacred cow. We took our Dell.com Solutions homepage and we completely revamped it and made it dynamic and streaming, which for us as a company is a big deal because that's what we do for living institutions. So yeah, don't mess with the sacred cow. Yeah, yeah, it was a cow. But your CEO and your founder is a real innovator so we also believe that this is a great opportunity as well. And I'm not going to lie. You've got a little bit of push there. I'm not going to lie, we do have a slight advantage of other companies in that we have a CEO who's like one of the most social CEOs in the world. He's into it, right? Yeah, and he gets it. So talk about marketing, email marketing. I mean, everyone in the old days, when there was actually trade magazines and Dell would market full page ads and do that normal stuff, little code there. And then the big thing was email marketing. Now at email's views, it's kind of an intimate thing but you said streaming, the world's out there now, now measurable. Everyone's got the same leads now. It's like one, they're all been polluted or saturated, but they're not as effective. People aren't responding to the lead gen as much. What's your take on that email marketing? I see still somewhat important as a touch point but not primary, do you agree? Yeah, I agree, but obviously, so here's what's interesting is that with email marketing, some customers may prefer to get things in email for whatever reason, but we can now use our social data to drive our email marketing. So for example, with the streaming content, if we know that these five articles went viral and people are subscribing to our cloud stream, then we can use that content and repush it through email or whatever mechanism customers want. And that's all customer driven, so it's not push marketing anymore. So a customer may say, hey, I want all your great cloud content every week and I want you to give it to me email or I want you to give it to me streaming or whatever. And now I have all the data to give them the most optimized email newsletter on the planet because I have the analytics to do that. And so email, if they want it, we can do an email but we use all that social data to drive our email strategy. And obviously we have lead gen and all that and all that as well. So, and we measure that to death. It's all about creating value, John. Yeah. So okay, my final, I love, bookie talk with us forever. So my final, I'm the same way. My final question, so my final question, we're getting the hook here. Yeah. My real final final. So I remember back in the early web days when I was involved in the web, we were all there as in New York at the time of the East Coast. And the interactive shops were, before we even worked interactive shops, they were essentially, oh yeah, you can have the basement and you can run that website thing. It morphed into the interactive shops, right? And then the rest is history. And you had the leaders like Procter and Gamble out there and others pushing the envelope on the web. Same things evolved here. You've seen social, you've seen social media practices. And again, I call that mostly PR consultative but now it's impacting advertising. So my question to you as someone at Dell, you have big purchasing power, you do a lot of stuff on a direct basis. What's changing in the agencies? Because now the agencies are now under pressure. What are you, what's your observations? You don't have to name names, but you can just share the folks of trends that you think are relevant, things that you think shouldn't be around anymore. Because those agencies are changing. The creatives changing, multiple campaigns. You could have now thousands of campaigns rather than three. So dollars are going to move into the digital channel on a big scale. What's your take on that? Yeah, I mean, I think the agencies have to change. And I feel like they're changing way too slowly, personally. I may be the minority, but they need to accept that this campaign mentality doesn't exist anymore. And it's not about running a campaign and paying you a bunch of money to run a single campaign. It's not about winning awards for cool creativity. Only, right? Where I feel like a lot of agencies still focus on paying me for this campaign that starts here and ends here. And then I'm going to build something super uber creative that's going to win a bunch of awards, but not going to get my customers engaged in my content. So I think agencies have to shift to this always on mentality. They have to shift to this content-oriented mentality where how are they going to help me scale my content creation? That's what I want an agency to do. It's how are they going to do that. And then the third thing is, agencies have to be the most valuable agencies that are the ones who are technical and can develop stuff and build stuff for me. I want an agency to come to me and say, here is a cool mobile platform that's going to drive your content in new ways to your customers. And you're probably asking for measurement too. I mean, so like now, with big data and with some of the instrumentation and the ability to slice and dice and have many verticals within verticals, it puts pressures on the agency, probably scares them too, like, oh shoot, I can be measured, you know. Oh, absolutely. It's an eye-opener. There's no real motivation there, I don't think, from their standpoint. So the new agencies are the ones saying, hey, I got some technical chops, I'll run multi-mode analytics, whatever you want. Yeah, no, absolutely. And then if you talk about the next category of agencies which are the social media agencies, like the gurus, right? That's also going away, I think, because the people who are gurus who keep telling us the world has changed, it's about conversations and all that, and you need to be in social media and blah, blah, blah. And it's a culture shift and use all these buzzwords. Like companies are past that now. They're way past it, yeah. What companies want is analytics. So the only social media agencies that will survive are the ones that actually will tell me things like, okay, Rishi, if you want your content to be seen, you must tweet it out at 4 p.m., 2 p.m., and these are the exact words that scientifically has proven to drive the most click-throughs, and da, da, da, da. Oh, and here's five people that are nursed into a massive spray of demographics. Right, right, right. Things like that, right? Insights around execution. Right, right. That's what I want social media agencies to tell me. I don't want them to tell me any more that I need to be in social media. Right? Most of the gurus do. Right? We're all social media gurus. We have to pat ourselves in the back. But the other day, it's about business value and making things work and show on the numbers, which is objective-based and at sales and whatever the objectives are. So this is a social media panel. We can go on for a day here. Rishi Day, congratulations. Dell on the cutting edge of social media, direct business model. Agencies are on full notice right now. New agencies. But the success here is real value. And this is theCUBE, SiliconANGLE.com. Social media broadcast outlets. Social TV, theCUBE. Be right back with our next guest after this short break.