Several weeks back, Dell as a company made a decision to give our employees access to social media sites. Todd Dwyer blogged about Facebook being open to Dell employees, and now we've expanded access to lots of other social media sites. Dell employees around the world now have access to sites like MySpace, LinkedIn, Bebo, Orkut, Flickr, Twitter, Friendfeed, Plurk and more. Some of you may have noticed that I've started embedding YouTube videos within Direct2Dell blog posts.
This latest development is an evolution of our social media strategy, and I think it's a good thing. In a lot of ways, this reminds me of the early days of the Internet. The objections for not opening up access to social media sites borrows a popular argument from back then: doing so will be a drain on employee productivity. So, why did we do it? Because more of our global customer base is having conversations on these sites. Beyond that, many customers reach out to Dell for support at these sites. Seems clear that these trends will continue.