Strategy

• Do Small Business Owners Need a Website?

  Mon. May. 12, 2008
  by Kelly Curnow, Small Business Community Manager

  “I don’t sell products online, so I don’t need a website.” That’s a common statement heard from small business owners. But you don’t have to sell products online to benefit from having a website. Entrepreneur.com emphasizes how a web presence helps customers, potential employees, business partners and even investors be able to quickly and easily find out more about your business and the products or services you offer.

  In this vlog, Karen Dayan, Senior Marketing Manager, Microsoft Office Live Small Business discusses the importance of websites for small business owners.

  Format: flv Duration: 4:06

  Downloads WMV  MP4  OGG

  If you decide a website is for you (or if you already have a website and are looking to improve it), here are some resources to help you out.

  • SmallBizTechnology.com: 10 Website Musts
  • StartUpNation.com: 11 Steps to Create a Successful Website
  • Localna8ion.com: Your Website Should be Your Star Sales Person
  • Dell Small Business 360: Build a Website to Win Customers
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• Say Hello to the Small Business Group Blog

  Tue. Apr. 15, 2008
  by Lionel Menchaca, Chief Blogger

  We figured the launch of a new line of Vostro laptops was good timing for rolling out our Small Business group blog. This is our third group blog for those who are counting. It joins Cloud Computing and Inside IT, and we're not done yet.

  You can learn more about the new notebooks at dell.com/newvostro. And to learn why we're launching the Small Business blog and a more detailed explanation of what to expect, please take a look at my introduction post over there.

  For future reference, you can access the Small Business group blog at www.direct2dell.com/smallbusiness.

  You can also subscribe to the Small Business blog RSS feed if you'd prefer.

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• Dell Goes Global with Small Business Award

  Wed. Apr. 09, 2008
  by Lionel Menchaca, Chief Blogger

  Back in January, I wrote a blog post that Dell was expanding the Small Business Excellence Award globally in partnership by working with the International Council for Small Business and Endeavor. Today we’ve launched the award in Europe, with entries now open for the U.K. and Germany. Entries for France, Italy and Spain opening later in the month.

  The goal here is to shine the spotlight on innovative small businesses in Europe and reward those who have best applied technology to create an exceptional customer experience. Small businesses are the lifeblood of any economy and many of today’s global brands started out as a small business. Dell is a good example and Michael’s story of how he built the company form only $1,000 in capital appears in business management classes around the world..

  There's a lot of small business success stories and we want to hear about them in Europe. If you’re a UK, German, French, Italian or Spanish company with 100 employees or less and have used information technology in an innovative way to improve the customer experience, you should give serious consideration to entering the Dell Small Business Excellence Award.

  Here's what's at stake: all national winners receive £15,000 / €20,000 in Dell products and services and will meet with Michael Dell to learn best practice methods at a special ‘Day at Dell’ later in the year.

  As well as Europe, the award is also being rolled out this year in Australia/New Zealand, Brazil, Canada, Japan, Mexico and China, while we’re in our fifth year in the US. This year we will also be announcing a global winner from the 11 national winners who will receive $50,000 / £25,000 in Dell solutions and the opportunity to meet with Michael Dell.

  For a more robust description of the criteria, rules and regulations, award levels, partners and judges, or to complete an application, visit this page.

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• New Channel Program: PartnerDirect

  Wed. Dec. 05, 2007
  by Lionel Menchaca, Chief Blogger

  Since I first blogged about solution providers back in May, I've received lots of e-mail from customers who want more information or have asked how to register with Dell. Besides those inquiries, we've been having conversations with many solution providers since then.

  Many of you have asked for things like a dedicated partner website, a deal registration tool, dedicated sales and customer care teams, partner logos and guidelines for marketing to customers, training and certification and more.

  Today, we're introducing PartnerDirect, which is a program that formalizes many of our efforts working with solution providers. It's our initial step to allow solution providers access to Dell's expertise in areas like build-to-order, software customization, and solution deployment capabilities.

  Beyond the PartnerDirect website at www.dell.com/partner, we're also launching a PartnerDirect discussion board on the Dell Community Forum. PartnerDirect is now available to channel partners in the United States and will be available in additional countries beginning in early 2008.

  In just over an hour (at 12:15 - 1:15pm Central Time), Dell is hosting a Partner Town Hall Meeting. Greg Davis, who is the vice president and general manager of Dell's Americas Channel Group will talk about this program and Dell's long-term vision for working with partners. There will also be a Q&A session during the second half of the call.

  If you are interested, here are the details:

  • Dell Partner Town Hall Meeting
  • Wednesday, December 5; 12:15 - 1:15 Central Time
  • (800) 871-6754
  • Meeting Key: 25623984

  In this vlog,  Greg explains PartnerDirect in more detail, discusses how we plan to address channel conflict, evolving Dell culture and gives insights to how we will shape this area of our business moving forward.

  Format: flv Duration: 7:10

  Downloads WMV  MP4  OGG

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• Share Your Stories About IT Complexity

  Tue. Nov. 13, 2007
  by Jeff Johnson, Enterprise Strategist

  Everyone in technology knows that IT is too complex.  By announcing its Simplify IT initiatives, Dell has certainly gone on record saying we're doing something about it. 

  While IT complexity is a serious subject, actual stories are often pretty funny.  I don't know about you, but I've seen plenty of examples that are so tragic they are actually hilarious.  Like unclear and acronym-filled user's manuals, stupid things end-users day and do, idiotic management decisions, and bizarre stories.  Here is one I heard recently.  One company needed to update their server image, but didn't have any automated tools to do so.  They spent weeks updating one server at a time - with a CD.  The IT people actually TRIED to get sick, by eating pizza that was a couple days old, just so they could go home.  There are a lot more like this.

  The conversations need to happen, but people can have a little fun doing it.  (Who says IT people don't have a sense of humor?)  So that is why Dell has become the charter sponsor of The IT Room (http://www.theitroom.com/), sort of a "Digital Dilbert for the IT Crowd" and a place to share horror stories and rant and rave.   This gives people a place to join the fight against IT complexity. 

  We were approached by a company, MotivFilms, to participate with other technology companies in this project and immediately jumped at the chance to participate. Dell doesn't own this project—we're just one voice in this conversation. But since we do have a thing or two to say about simplifying IT, we'll participate in the discussion.

  Dell will continue to support the dialogue around IT complexity, and will continue to sponsor The IT Room along with the other advertisers.  We're wholeheartedly supporting the idea because it generates the right kind of conversations. So join us the fight against IT complexity!  Start by mocking it.

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• Staples to Offer Dell Systems, Ink & Toner

  Mon. Oct. 22, 2007
  by Lionel Menchaca, Chief Blogger

  Today we announced a retail agreement with Staples, the world's largest office supply retail chain. Beginning on November 11, we will begin selling some Dell systems, displays, printers and ink and toner throughout 1,400 Staples stores across the United States. 

  Since we entered the printer market with Dell-branded printers in 2003, customers purchased replacement ink and toner via Dell.com. While that process has worked well for many of our customers, some like guardianxps shared an idea called "Sell ink cartridges at local retail" in the early days of IdeaStorm. We will still offer continue to offer ink and toner online—the only thing that this changes is that customers will have more options to get replacements when they need them.

  As far as systems and other hardware, we will offer unique configurations of our Inspiron 1521 and 1721 notebooks, our Inspiron 530 desktop, the 19-inch SE198WFP or the 22-inch E228WFP widescreen LCD displays. As far as printers, we will offer Dell's 926 and 948 all-in-one inkjets and the 1320c color laser printer. Staples will offer ink and toner for most models of our printers. Customers can recycle by returning used Dell cartridges to the store for a $3.00 coupon that is good toward a future ink purchase.

  With this agreement, Dell products are now available in over 10,000 stores worldwide. It's all part of our evolving retail strategy. If you're interested in seeing all retail-related blog content, please take a look at the Retail category. Otherwise, you can also get an RSS feed to the retail-specific blog content here.

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• Dell to Open Retail Store in Russia

  Wed. Sep. 19, 2007
  by Lionel Menchaca, Chief Blogger

  Michael Dell took part in a media briefing in Moscow today to discuss Dell's plans to open a retail store in the new Gorbuskin Dvor retail center. The store will open next month and will offer notebooks, desktops, servers, printers and more. This is part of additional investments that we'll be making in Russia, which is one of the fastest-growing computer markets in the world.

  Customers will be able to see demonstrations of products and talk to experts about what products make sense for home use or what's required to run a small business. Besides hardware, the store will also offer a service outlet to provide hardware warranty repairs for Dell equipment. While we already sell our systems alongside competitors' products in other Moscow retail locations, this is the first store in Moscow that will sell Dell products exclusively.

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• Is it Possible to be Everything to Everybody?

  Fri. Sep. 07, 2007
  by Laura P. Thomas, Global eCommerce

  As I hinted in my last post here, a rather large 2D web project has been taking my focus away from 3D initiatives lately. That project is a redesign of the home page of Dell.com.

  How can one single web page be a big project?  When it's a page that gets more than 35 million visitors a week.  When it is the subject of some of the most popular posts on IdeaStorm. When that one page is the entryway to both a corporate and a commerce site. When it must appeal to everyone from individual consumers to large corporate clients, from institutional investors to mainstream media and citizen journalists. When it has to be a place where a student can research a company for their freshman business class, and purchase a computer upon which to write that same paper.

  This is the challenge faced as we roll out a  beta test of a new design today in the United States. Canada will follow next week. More regions will offer the beta in the future. Here's how it will work: 20% of visitors to Dell.com over the next week will be randomly selected for this beta test. 10% of that test audience will see the page as it is today. The other 10 % will see the redesigned page.  We will then compare clickstream data and basic metrics from those two groups to determine if the new page works or not.

  How will we know if it works? If customers tell us it is easier to find the right level of information they need-whether that means finding support for existing products or researching information for future purchases, or adding to the conversation. We don't want to be an Irrelevant Corporate Website. To us, that means integrating community sites such as this blog, the Dell Community Forum, StudioDell and more. Customers like jorge are telling us the same thing on IdeaStorm.

  Click on the image below to see a larger version of the screenshot.

  
  What the redesign doesn't do is what many have voted for—eliminate customer segmentation. We still believe segmentation offers benefits for the customer and here's one reason why: when we have discussions with customers many of them say they dislike being asked to segment themselves when they begin shopping on dell.com; but, many also tell us that they use technology in very different ways and have different needs.  An example of this is a recent survey of small business owners and decision makers conducted by Dell and the International Council for Small Business.  This sort of feedback went into the development of the new Vostro line of notebooks and desktops, as well as the suite of services designed specifically to support small businesses.  As Dell continues to differentiate the products and services we offer our customers, segmentation will begin to make more sense to site visitors.

  So, if you visit Dell.com over the next week and see the new design, feel free to click on the "feedback" link at the footer of the page to let us know what you think.  Or, you can come back here and share your comments on this post.  I look forward to hearing even more opinions on this challenging page.

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• Linux Rolls On

  Fri. Jul. 06, 2007
  by Lionel Menchaca, Chief Blogger

  Know some of you saw this in last week's post, but I wanted to be clear that Dell does have plans to offer Linux to more consumers in additional locations outside the United States. More details to come later this summer. We will also offer Ubuntu to small business customers in the future. As soon as we have more details to share, I'll blog about both topics here.

  Starting next week, we're going to tweak how we blog about Linux on Direct2Dell. Many who follow our Linux developments are already familiar with the Linux category on the blog and already have RSS subscriptions to it. After talking to some of the key team members on the Linux engineering team, it seems like there is an opportunity to provide more technical updates for folks who are interested.

  Here's how we're going to do it: we'll have an expanded group of Linux engineers provide these updates that may be as short as a sentence or two that would be of interest to certain customers. These short updates may be related to a specific open source project, or may pertain to a specific Linux distribution, for instance. But instead of appearing on the main Direct2Dell home page where all other posts show up, these incremental updates will only show up in the Linux category. Now Linux-related posts that may be of interest to a broader set of customers (like this one) will still appear on the home page.

  Bottom line: if you're a customer who uses Red Hat or Suse-based PowerEdge servers at work and Ubuntu on an Inspiron notebook at home, or if you're just passionate about Linux and open source initiatives, go ahead and subscribe to the Linux category. You can do that by plugging in this URL to your favorite RSS reader. That way, you'll be sure to see all Linux-related posts coming from the Dell team. What this all means is that you'll be hearing from a few different Linux engineering folks on a pretty regular basis: Matt Domsch, John Hull and Michael E. Brown will be the main contributors to the expanded Linux content on Direct2Dell.

  This recent post from Tom Dryer caught my eye a couple of days ago, and thought I'd comment on it here. If the rumors about HP offering Ubuntu are true, we're glad to see other vendors join us in support of Ubuntu and open source. We welcome HP and other system vendors that want to join in this initiative.

  And speaking of things that caught my eye, you'd be surprised how our recent Linux offerings are affecting folks at Dell. Just watch this video.

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• Small Business Town Hall with Michael Dell on July 10

  Tue. Jul. 03, 2007
  by Lionel Menchaca, Chief Blogger

  On Tuesday, July 10, at 12:00 p.m. EDT, Michael Dell will hold a small business customer town hall at the Reuters Building in Times Square. This is an opportunity for hundreds of small businesses from around the world to join a live audience to participate in an hour-long discussion on technology issues unique to your business.

  If you are a small business with fewer than 25 employees and want to join us, please visit the registration link here.

  Part of the town hall will be a Q&A session where participants can ask Michael his thoughts on how they can use technology to make the most of their business. He'll be there to share news about upcoming Dell products and services, discuss things like technology trends and their impact on small businesses, and to talk about how we'll continue efforts to make IT easier to manage and more affordable to small businesses.

  Beyond that, Dell Group members can watch the live Webcast in Second Life at the StudioDell Theater. We will take questions from SL and share them with with Michael, along with questions he receives from the live audience and other Webcast viewers. If you'd like to get your questions in the queue early, just IM them to Pyrrha Dell. 

  More to come next week.

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