Big news! Bob Pearson, former VP of Communities and Conversation at Dell, is joining GasPedal as President of the Blog Council and Senior Vice President of Communities. (Read the announcement here.)
With more than 25 years at three Fortune 500 companies and as one of the pioneers of corporate social media, Bob brings a wealth of experience and knowledge to GasPedal and the Blog Council — and he’s as excited as we are to make our communities a better experience and more resourceful for all of our current and future members.
To welcome Bob aboard, we thought we’d ask him a few questions on his experiences in social media and share his thoughts:
Q: How did you get into social media in the first place?
I got involved in social media when I started at Dell. Our number one focus was to reach out to customers who were dissatisfied with their technology experience. We wanted to figure out the best way to reach them, which drove us to build a great blog monitoring platform and to put a process in place where we had blog resolution experts.
The core of it was: How do we have a better experience directly with our customers? Social media made a lot of sense at Dell, because Dell was a direct company from the beginning.
Q: What did you learn from working in social media at a company like Dell?
Social media reinforces a lot of the core beliefs that people have at any company: That you want to have complete transparency with your customer; you want to have conversations with customers, not toss a lot of content at them. It’s the ultimate way to have that direct relationship and interaction with the customer.
The other thing that we learned about our customers was that customers generally want to do three things: They want to share their ideas so they can improve the next generation of products and services; they want to review your products so they can help other customers make purchase decisions; and then, really, no one knows your products better than your customers — so they want to share their solutions with other customers.
Part of a company’s role in 2009 is actually to empower the customer’s voice and to enable it, as opposed to the older way of doing it which was to talk at the customer — that’s never really made sense.
Q: How is social media changing business? And through that, changing the world?
What’s happening is a new discipline is forming that we refer to as social media. In the very beginning of social media, people tried to label it as either a marketing thing or a communications thing or something else. The answer is actually, “none of the above.” It’s actually a new discipline that companies can use to impact any business process, any aspect of their relationships with employees or customers. It’s important for communications, it’s important for HR, it’s important for IT, it’s important for tech support — it’s important for all aspects of a company.
The leaders in social media will see it as a discipline and embed it throughout their company. Those are the folks who will optimize these capabilities.
Q: What are the major trends you see in social media today?
The pace of change in the online world is tremendous right now. There’s an average of 500,000 people going online every day for the first time in their lives. We now have about 1.5 billion people online today. How we search and the meaning of search is changing — Google is now the new homepage, or MSN, or Yahoo!. But also, YouTube, as an engine, would be the third largest search engine in the world.
It’s so important for companies to become students of social media, so at the same time they’re building the discipline in their companies, they’re also on top of the trends of how people buy, browse, and socialize.
Q: What brings you to GasPedal and the Blog Council?
I want to join because I believe very passionately that what we’re all doing collectively — all the members of the Blog Council — is essential in creating this new discipline and how we use social media. When you’re creating a new discipline, it’s critical to share insights and learning on everything from online policies to how to deal with hurdles within a company.
That’s my commitment — I want to join and help this become the best place for people to actually learn in real time to help their own companies. I think that was the initial mission of the Blog Council and I want to do my part to help accelerate it.
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You can say hello to Bob or ask him a few of your own questions through Twitter. Follow him at @bobpearson1845
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Congratulations, Bob. The journey ahead in the new role looks potentially as exciting as the one you’ve just completed at Dell. Thanks again for the opportunity to participate in the IdeaStorm pilot. That experiment has to be one of the most insightful social media projects to date.
Regards, David
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