Digital Impact Recap: Dell on socializing the organization

April 4, 2012

“Conversations are conversations — not business segments. They are based on what people feel,” said Richard Binhammer, director of social media and community at Dell The PRSA 2012 Digital Impact Conference at New York’s Sentry Center, Binhammer discussed how people are using the Web to connect and how “social brings new dynamics to continuing to grow the intersection between business value and customer value.”

He said that there are three types of relationships: authority, community and exchange.

“Business has been about the exchange of relationships and social has been about community relationships,” he said. “But business needs to shift to more of a community relationship.”

Communicators need to listen, learn, engage and act, he said. “Social media is a tool to be leveraged across the fabric of a company — it has different functions, uses and values. Fundamentally, social media does not scale.”

Practitioners have an opportunity to reshape the PR profession and in order to do that, Binhammer said, people need to move FROM:

1. Social business communicator TO Connecting directly — beyond relying on traditional media.
2. Communication counselor beyond management TO Empowered employees
3. News and events TO Storytelling with meaning
4. Beyond publication and “telling” TO Sharing and connecting

He also emphasized that public relations professionals don’t need to rely on media relations. “News releases are just facts, but social media is not just facts — it’s facts and feelings of people,” he said. “And PR is not about putting the ‘public’ back in public relations; it’s about putting the ‘relations’ back in public relations.”

We can connect directly with social media, allowing stories to become bottom-up instead of top-down. “We’ve relied to long on a third party to tell our stories,” he said. “Let us narrate instead.”
 
 

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