At the Le Web con­fer­ence in Paris, I spoke with Richard Bin­ham­mer, bet­ter known as @RichardATDell on Twit­ter. Three years ago Richard, who was and still is work­ing in pub­lic affairs, was told by his boss to start get­ting engaged in blog­ger rela­tions. It appears that Binhammer’s move into social media was one of the many responses to the 2005 Dell Hell out­burst ini­ti­ated by social media con­sul­tant Jeff Jarvis, who wrote an open let­ter to Dell com­plain­ing about Dell’s cus­tomer ser­vice. At the time, Dell’s response was, “We don’t respond to bloggers.”

It took this dra­matic sit­u­a­tion to shake Dell up, but they finally did respond a year later with a full social media pres­ence that’s been valu­able for cus­tomer ser­vice and pro­mot­ing sales. Bin­ham­mer said that Dell’s use of Twit­ter is respon­si­ble for $6.5 mil­lion in sales worldwide.

In the video I gave Bin­ham­mer a lit­tle bit of a hard time regard­ing his min­i­mal opin­ion on the HP sit­u­a­tion I had that I pub­lished here before (“Why I love pub­lic trans­porta­tion and hate HP” and HP’s response). Granted, I caught him off guard and didn’t tell him the full story, but I was look­ing for a more con­crete answer to the pro­ce­dure on how he’d go around han­dling a sin­gle com­plaint like mine from some­one who is estab­lished online. Off cam­era we talked more about how every inci­dent is dif­fer­ent. And I agree, there isn’t one pat answer, but there are pro­ce­dures to han­dle things and I’m still eager to know more about Dell’s procedure.

Does your com­pany have pro­ce­dures on han­dling neg­a­tive con­ver­sa­tion in the social media space? If so, let us know. What pro­ce­dures work? What don’t work? Eager for a discussion.

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• Dell makes $6.5m from Twit­ter sales (guardian.co.uk)
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David Spark helps busi­nesses grow by devel­op­ing thought lead­er­ship through sto­ry­telling and cov­er­ing live events at Spark Media Solu­tions. He blogs at The Spark Minute and can be heard and seen reg­u­larly on ABC Radio, Cranky Geeks with John C. Dvo­rak, and KQED in San Fran­cisco. See his busi­ness pro­file, con­tact David, or leave a com­ment below.

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