Dell To Launch Social Media Listening Command Center

From Mashable:

Dell’s CEO Michael Dell and CMO Karen Quintos will officially launch the company’s Social Media Listening Command Center today.

We first heard wind of this development in October when Dell’s Vice President of Social Media and Community Manish Mehta announced that Dell had plans to launch the program at Altimeter’s Rise of Social Commerce Conference. Just more than two months later, that announcement is coming to fruition with the opening of the center.

Shortly after the October announcement, Mehta commented on a blog post by Altimeter’s Industry Analyst Jeremiah Owyang about the project’s purpose:

“Our new ‘Ground Control’ is about tracking the largest number [of] possible conversations across the web and making sure we ‘internalize’ that feedback — good and bad…

“Dell’s Ground Control is also about getting that information to the right people wherever they are in the Dell organization, globally and functionally. It’s also about tracking what you might call the ‘long tail’… those smaller matters that might not bubble to the surface today, but are out there… and deserve to be heard. We want to ‘hear’ them too — contrary to the scenarios about ’squeaky wheels getting grease.’”

Based in its Round Rock, Texas headquarters, Dell’s new social monitor center will be an integral part of its @Dellcares customer care and tech support. The company already does a commendable job at reaching its global audience via social media, but it plans to up the ante by offering support in 11 languages by the end of the year.

Dell is using social media monitoring tool Radian6 to power its data collection. The center will track on average more than 22,000 daily topic posts related to Dell, as well as mentions of Dell on Twitter. The information can be sliced and diced based on topics and subjects of conversation, sentiment, share of voice, geography and trends.

While this is an innovative move on Dell’s part, this isn’t the first social media monitoring center of its kind. In June, Gatorade was the first to launch a social media control center, with the opening of its Social Media Mission Control Center, which looks strikingly similar to Dell’s center.

This news, combined with Gatorade’s earlier launch, seems to be the start of a new trend of developing specialized monitoring practices within organizations. We hope that it leads to brands becoming more participatory in online dialogue about them, and that those insights are used for optimizing product and marketing decisions.

We got a sneak peek of the Social Media Listening Command Center in action. Check out the video and images below and let us know your thoughts on the concept and implementation in the comments.