I don’t make $42 an hour.

Demand Studios — an arm of Demand Media — has been in the news a lot lately. Most notably, its business model and its ambitions to score some clients among traditional media outlets have been written up in The New York Times (Feb. 7), Vanity Fair (Feb. 3) and Folio Magazine (Feb. 4). The tenor of the recent articles about Demand ranges from bemused to hostile. Criticism of the company and its business model typically falls into three categories:

• It’s a sweatshop, undervaluing writers, videographers and editors with paltry wages.
• The content isn’t very good.
• Journalists who work for Demand Studios are sell-outs, allowing themselves to be exploited.

I wouldn’t begin to speak for Demand Media on any of those points. I can only address them as one tiny cog among 7,000 who contribute as writers, editors and other professional content-creators in a business model that has already been widely detailed elsewhere, most notably in Wired’s piece, “The Answer Factory.”

My experience has been positive since I started freelancing for Demand in October. I have been most impressed by how organized the place is. Demand easily slid me into the system with carefully written, thorough guidelines that explain how things work, the editing process and where to go for help. The online editing tools have worked largely without a glitch.

I can set my watch based on when my pay shows up in my PayPal account every Tuesday and Friday. My copy chief always gets back to me promptly with answers to my questions. I’ve gotten a couple of reviews, pointing out where I can improve and what I’m doing well.

As for the criticisms in the media:

The Pay. As I said, I don’t make $42 an hour. Some articles take longer to edit than others. As reported elsewhere, I make $3.50 per article. If I can edit five to seven an hour, on average, I’m pretty satisfied. Remember, I’d not breaking rocks here. I sit on the couch in the living room with a laptop, a beverage and, sometimes, the TV in the background.

I have had no problem averaging $20 to $25 an hour. And even if I don’t finish more than four articles in an hour, I’ve usually sent a couple back to the writers for a rewrite. That’s basically money in the bank. Writers have one chance to address questions in a rewrite; after that, I can approve or reject them — and I get paid either way.

I’m not doing this to get rich; I’m doing it to help with expenses and with some extras — like the $300 visit from the plumber last week. And, as others said in the Times’ story, I’m doing it as a safety net. The safety net just got slightly safer, by the way: Demand just notified me last week that I’ve become eligible for health insurance through the company if I want it.

The Quality of the Content. None of the articles I’ve read are going to win Pulitzer Prizes. On the other hand, I get a kick out of reading them. I’ve learned something from them. Because I’ve been editing mostly tech-related articles, I’ve learned a lot more about how to use my computer, how to troubleshoot computer problems, cell phone tips and tricks, how to find handy tools and utilities online and built-in tricks in common software programs (like Microsoft Word and Excel).

Demand Media executives have acknowledged that there are some clunkers out there. I have read some dreadful material. And when I couldn’t improve it, I have been empowered to reject it. The message is loud and clear from the people I interact with: Demand wants useful content and clear writing.

Whether Journalists Are Exploited. This dovetails with the issue of pay. I wasn’t forced to apply for this job and if I weren’t feeling rewarded in some way, I wouldn’t do it. When I run into a string of badly written articles, I can put the computer down and find something else to do. I can put in an hour in the morning, an hour at night and satisfy my needs and Demand’s needs. If I don’t have time tonight, I don’t edit; if I have extra time on the weekend, I can edit more. There’s always work.

If I averaged $20 an hour, 40 hours a week, 52 weeks a year, that’s $41,600 a year. And that’s not bad for the kind of work it is.

And the funny thing is, as dumb as some of the articles might sound — yesterday I edited, “How to Turn on Your Zune” — someone must have searched for that information online, or the article wouldn’t exist.

That anecdote, whether or not it’s apocryphal, came to mind when I read USA Today’s story, “Some ditch social networks to reclaim time, privacy.” The headline pretty much captures the point of the story.

Their reasons run the gamut from being besieged by online “friends” who aren’t really friends to lingering concerns over where their messages and photos might materialize. If there’s a common theme to their exodus, it’s the nagging sense that a time-sucking habit was taking the “real” out of life.

Now people are joking (online, of course, via Twitter, Facebook and other tools) about Google Buzz. “Just got Google Buzz access. Thank God, I needed yet another place to post status updates,” buzzed Jim Brady, with tongue firmly in cheek.

The USA Today spends a lot of time on the trend of some people deleting online profiles or using software to handle the task for them. I favor clicking the “sign out” button when the connections get too much or they get in the way of real life. Accounts on social networking sites are for my convenience.

Post-Medium Publishing
An excellent analysis of whether people actually pay for content. I agree with a lot of this post; some of my colleagues look at me like I’m crazy.

Etaoin Shrdlu: Seminal work or sloppy thinking?
Jeff Jarvis has already anointed it as “seminal” and reprinted more than 350 words of Paul Graham’s Post Medium Publishing, so let me try and bring something different to the party: some examples of sloppy thinking and errors in the piece.

Clay Shirky: Let a thousand flowers bloom to replace newspapers; don’t build a paywall around a public good
Nieman Journalism Lab
Full transcript and audio from Shirky’s remarks.

The Beginner’s Guide to Tricking Out Your WordPress Blog
Lifehacker
Great tips for setting up your WP blog and for deciding which plugins to grab.

Austin police fed up with bogus online comments
www.policeone.com
Perhaps not the best way to deal with attacks on you in social media sites? Perhaps engage instead of litigate?

Rise and fall of jobs in Missouri and the St. Louis area.

I love this visualization of how jobs have fluctuated over the past five years in the St. Louis area. Link to see the functioning graphic on my colleague Steve Giegerich’s blog, STL JobWatch. The graphic shows expanding and contracting circles each month over the past five years, representing how many jobs were added or subjected to the economy each month.

Post-Dispatch interactive designers Brian Williamson and Erica Smith created the graphic based on research I’d done with data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, which adjusted the data for seasonality.

The graphic, a snapshot of area employment, reflects the counties and cities where the employed and unemployed reside and not, necessarily, the business locations where they work or worked. The graphic includes representations of the rise and fall of jobs in the St. Louis metropolitan area and the major metro areas of Missouri.

A similar graphic of the national employment scene, designed by TIP Strategies, provided the inspiration for this map.

Jim McKelvey shows off Square. (Dawn Majors, St. Louis Post-Dispatch)

My colleague Tim Barker had a story this past weekend for our business section about the next business venture for Jack Dorsey, the St. Louisan who co-founded Twitter and has just started generating buzz for his latest venture, Square.

The mobile credit card payment system depends on a small piece of hardware that plugs into the audio jack in a user’s smart phone. With that dongle, a user can accept a credit card payment by swiping the card through it, getting the buyer to sign with his finger on the phone and, bingo, the transaction is done.

Tim (who is one of the reporters I edit) interviewed Jim McKelvey, a co-owner with Dorsey in Square and the guy who helped inspire the idea, thanks to a lost sale at his Third Degree Glass Factory in St. Louis. McKelvey couldn’t take a payment from a customer who wanted to pay with American Express.

The initial coverage we read on TechCrunch (here and here) was fascinating. And, of course, Dorsey is a local guy, so we wanted to delve a little more deeply into the story.

I especially like that Tim found a Washington University professor who says he’d been working with Dorsey and McKelvey on the concept for Square:

Bob Morley, an associate professor of electrical engineering at Washington University, worked with the pair earlier this year and has applied for a patent on the device. But after months of negotiations over compensation failed, they basically agreed to go their separate ways, with Square saying it would use something different for card reading.

The professor says he has no ill feelings toward Square: “I just want to get my story out there. It’s actually my idea and it’s for sale.”

Both of us were also fascinated by the skepticism of the idea from conventional credit card watchers — although TechCrunch had reported investments in Square that valued the company (already) at $40 million. Tim quoted a couple of market watchers:

“He’s really going after the bottom-of-the-barrel merchants,” said Andy Kleitsch, chief executive for Seattle-based Billing Revolution, which has a system that lets merchants send bills to customers’ cell phones.

And this…

“It’s largely just hype at this point,” said Aaron McPherson, of research firm IDC Financial Insights in Framingham, Mass. “I wouldn’t put too much stock in it.”

And then, of course, there are the competitors. Even still, Tim wasn’t able to get the Square folks to discuss many details about how they’re going to make it happen — and how they’ll assume any risk for credit card sales issues.

Since Tim’s story ran the Sunday after Christmas, I wanted to put it out there again in hopes that a few more people might read it. Cheers.

As you can imagine, we’ve watched the uproar closely in the wake of my blog post on Monday. I recounted the case of a person who lost his job at a local school after twice posting a vulgar comment on the Talk of the Day blog on Friday.

We don’t condone vulgarity or obscenity on our site. We won’t tolerate it. Increasingly, we are concerned about the tone of the conversation on STLtoday. When we can, we ban people without apology for bad behavior. We have taken steps to beef up our review process and we’ll continue to enhance those measures to address bad language and intolerant speech.

We also miss stuff, so we depend on you to point out those comments and help us deal with them. That’s not new; we’ve said that from the beginning. We want to hear from you.

On Friday, I saw the reader’s comments, I noticed the comments came from a school and I made the decision to call. The school used its server logs to track the comments, based on the time they were made, to a single work station. After confronting the employee, he resigned. Since then, I’ve heard the criticism, loud and clear.

The criticism of me falls largely in four categories. First, that I overreacted, using an atomic fly-swatter to address the issue. Second, that I somehow violated our privacy policy. Third, that I’ve set some sort of precedent for how we deal with readers who make obscene comments. And fourth, that I was gleeful or boastful in blogging about the incident in the first place.

In the wake of a few days of reflection, I would like to clear up some misinformation and offer some thoughts on what I’ve learned from this episode.

Did I reveal private information? No. I had none to reveal and wouldn’t have if I had it. From me, the school learned three things: 1) That the comments were posted; 2) When the comments were posted; 3) That I knew they came from the school based on the DNS information that accompanied the IP address. The school knows its own IP address. Knowing when the comments were posted allowed them to track them to a specific work station through its own server logs.

Could I have simply banned the reader? Perhaps, but not reliably. Our blogs don’t require registration for reader comments. He used a fake e-mail address. There wasn’t a way on Friday to reliably prevent him from commenting.

Could I have banned the IP address? Yes, but that would have prevented anyone from the school from visiting our site. That’s a step we preferred not to take.

Did I “hunt someone down” after seeing the comments? No. There was no “sleuthing” involved. The name of the school was readily visible on the e-mail alert about the comment.

Was I gloating about this incident? That wasn’t my intention. And I regret that it sounded like I was. I intended to simply explain to readers a step I’d tried to help rein in the vulgarity. I was utterly surprised by the reaction.

Have I set some sort of precedent for STLtoday? We don’t routinely, and would not routinely take the steps I took in this case. For particularly bad cases of abusing our guidelines with vulgarity and obscenity, we would not rule it out.

Did I overreact? Maybe I did. I am constantly frustrated by the difficulty of dealing with this kind of language. And in this case, I was motivated by three things.

First, this came from a school. I didn’t know if it came from an employee, a guest or a student. But I viewed it as a “teachable moment” and a chance, perhaps, to nip something in the bud, to engage the community to help me. I didn’t anticipate that the reader would resign.

Second, the comment was posted, deleted and intentionally posted a second time by the same person. Too much time had elapsed between posts for it to be a mistake or an accident. The reader was determined to post it.

Third, it was easy. As I said, I didn’t have to dig for the school’s information. It was readily available on the e-mail alert. Had it not been there, I may have deleted the comment and moved on.

A few things I’ve learned from this episode:

I should have walked the idea around the newsroom a little more before calling the school. I was motivated by the fact that it was a school. We may have decided to try something less drastic. We may have done exactly the same thing. I couldn’t know without asking.

I should take pains to measure my language carefully. As I said, I hadn’t intended to display glee over this incident. Some of my language in an early version of the blog item and some Twitter remarks was not consistent with my intention.

This isn’t new, but it reinforces what I have always known: Your trust is paramount. I did not and would not violate our privacy policy. I regret that this episode may have cast doubt on that. We take our privacy policy seriously.

We also take seriously our responsibility to monitor conversation on STLtoday. We know there is more we can do, operationally and technologically to improve. We’ve already talked about how and when to escalate our response to bad language.

My colleagues and I agree we are committed to working as hard as we can to foster and encourage discussion on STLtoday. That means taking a measured approach to consider any and all steps — within our policies — to put a stop to it or eliminate it when we see it.

Courtesy altemark via Flickr

A single vulgar word cost a man his job on Friday.

It all started with Friday’s edition of Talk of the Day, a regular blog on the St. Louis Post-Dispatch’s website, STLtoday.com. Talk of the Day is exactly that. A conversation around the water-cooler topic of the day. Friday’s edition is often a little lighter. Last week, it was about the strangest things you’ve ever eaten, loosely pegged on a story about deer meat.

By mid-morning, a number of folks had commented about their experiences with Bird’s Nest Soup, octopus, cow brains and rattlesnake. Then, while I was in our 10 a.m. news meeting, someone posted a vulgar, two-syllable word for a part of a woman’s anatomy. It was there only a minute before a colleague deleted it.

A few minutes later, the same guy posted the same single-word comment again. I deleted it, but noticed in the WordPress e-mail that his comment had come from an IP address at a local school. So I called the school. They were happy to have me forward the e-mail, though I wasn’t sure what they’d be able to do with the meager information it included.

About six hours later, I heard from the school’s headmaster. The school’s IT director took a shine to the challenge. Long story short: Using the time-frame of the comments, our website location and the IP addresses in the WordPress e-mail, he tracked it back to a specific computer. The headmaster confronted the employee, who resigned on the spot.

The resource at Social Media Governance includes links to policies from a range of organizations — media companies, governments, universities, PR firms, non-profits, public companies and more. Some focus on how the organizations use social media for their own ends. Others seek to govern how employees use social media on their own time.

I read a bunch of them. Some were very long. Others concise. Drawing on the common themes I saw, here my seven guidelines for drafting social media guidelines.

Be encouraging
I was amazed how few guidelines overtly encouraged employees to use social media. Then I saw this from Chicago’s DePaul University: “DePaul University supports your participation in these online communities.” If you really do think social media is important for your organization, say so.

Be positive
The best of the guidelines I read framed their advice positively – do this, rather than don’t do this. Some of the guidelines I read credited Fellowship Church in Grapevine, Texas, for inspiration. Almost every point of its social media guideline is expressed in the form of “respect” for various principles: for the church and staff; for the beliefs of the church; for copyright laws; for your time at work; and so forth.

Be brief
Less is more. The longer your guidelines are, the more your employees will be discouraged from participating. If employees fear running afoul of an edict buried in a morass of examples, what-ifs and scenarios, you’ll teach them that nothing can be gained by dipping their toe into social media. You can’t anticipate everything. Don’t try. I thought the American Red Cross did a pretty good job of respecting this suggestion. So did a template suggested by Shift Communications in Boston. The BBC didn’t.

Be respectful
Your guidelines should send a message to your employees: You trust them. You already trust them to speak to customers, readers, sources and advertisers on the phone, by e-mail, on the street. Trust them elsewhere.

Be reflective
Reflect back on existing policies. Why repeat what’s already spelled out in your existing ethics guidelines? You’ve already told employees that they shouldn’t reveal proprietary information, trade secrets and private data. For journalists, you’ve already got guidelines that caution against overtly supporting campaigns, candidates or issues that could open them to charges of bias. A quick reminder of how that plays out in the language of social media — friends, followers and causes — would suffice. This, BBC did well. So did Dell, the Mayo Clinic, Yahoo! and National Public Radio (which I also reviewed, though it is not included in the database just yet).

Be social
Many of the guidelines I reviewed encouraged employees to participate in dialog, with three reminders: Remember how your online behavior reflects on you and the company; respect colleagues’ privacy; assume nothing posted online will remain private.

Be available
Many of the guidelines recognized that they couldn’t anticipate every situation. They encouraged employees to ask a supervisor if they had questions.

Here’s a few specific highlights I ran across.

Value what employees can do. The American Red Cross asks employees to let headquarters know if they’re blogging. “National headquarters does not intend to ‘police’ the blogging community. Quite the contrary: we want to aggregate all the powerful stories Red Crossers are telling and showcase your individual contribution to the overall mission and gather links in a page at Redcross.org.”

Over-thinking, over-regulating, over-doing it. The BBC’s guidelines include this: “Through the open nature of such sites, it is also possible for third parties to collate vast amounts of information. For example, The Shawshank Redemption is the most popular film amongst the 11,899 members of the BBC network on Facebook and 8 percent list their political views as ‘liberal’.” My heavens. Is this kind of detail really necessary? This sounds paranoid, not encouraging.

Disclosure is good. Almost every policy requires employees to make their affiliation clear. Some only require it if employees will be mentioning their association with the company in their online activities. I found this line curious in the Mayo Clinic’s guidelines: “If your blog, posting or other online activities are inconsistent with, or would negatively impact Mayo Clinic’s reputation or brand, you should not refer to Mayo Clinic, or identify your connection to Mayo Clinic.”

Friends aren’t necessarily friends. Guidelines that dictate who I can have on my “friends list” rub me wrong. That seems to invest the concept of “friends” with more meaning than it should. It doesn’t account for the fact that anyone, at any time, could become a “source.” Or that a friend who works in the neighboring cubicle today could work for the PR firm across town tomorrow.

The Roanoke Times‘ guidelines say, “Manage your friends carefully. Having one source on your friends list but not another is easily construed as bias. As above, be consistent. Accept no sources or people you cover as friends, or welcome them all.” Sure, ask employees to “manage friends carefully.” And leave it at that.

Don’t make it sound scary. This line in NPR’s guideline strikes me as raising fear: “Use the highest level of privacy tools available to control access to your personal activity when appropriate, but don’t let that make you complacent. It’s just not that hard for someone to hack those tools and make public what you thought was private.”

Courtesy kogakure, via Flickr under CC 2.0 license. http://bit.ly/tzAfY

One of my small pleasures at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch is a blog our religion writer Tim Townsend and I created. It’s called “Civil Religion.” For a year and a half, it’s been The Little Blog That Could. Nearly every post attracts comments. It gets respectable traffic numbers (more when it’s featured on the home page of STLtoday.com, of course). And its following is a loyal one.

The blog started with a dozen writers from the St. Louis community, representing a variety of faith traditions from Judaism to Islam to Christianity in many stripes — Catholicism, Mormon, evangelical and Episcopalian.

About a week ago, we debuted an expanded stable of bloggers. Some had dropped out of the earlier group. Now we’re up to about 30 who contribute and, already, we’ve seen traffic increase from the more-frequent contributions to the blog. I’m grateful for their contributions and their passion for the subject. They engage readers, they are often insightful and frequently controversial.

Now, a new development: Public relations people have begun taking notice of the blog, and send releases to our contributors, all of whom have day jobs, some of whom are clergy men and women. They have asked Tim what they can do with the releases. Some are interested in pursuing interviews, doing some research on the books, people, products and events that are presented to them.

They want to be reporters.

But they have never done it before. Tim compiled a basic primer on headline writing, linking to source material, verifying information and, of course, the ethics of journalism. As Tim wrote in his note to our bloggers, “Journalists have very, very strict guidelines about what we can, and can’t accept from PR people who hope to elicit some coverage for their product or service in the newspaper. Since you’re blogging on a Post-Dispatch platform, we ask that you, too, abide by these ethical guidelines.”

He included the Post-Dispatch’s ethics guidelines, which I’m not including here. I am including a number of online primers that I’ve shared with Tim for the benefit of our Civil Religion crew. They range from the ethics of journalism and blogging to the basics of reporting and writing.

Maybe you have a similar project that can benefit. And maybe you have other sites to suggest!

journopdx – Journalism basics
Literally, the basics. This is an outline of a session by Michelle V. Rafter at a conference for bloggers. Even the outline would provide good basics for beginners.

Weblog Ethics
From Rebecca Blood’s “Weblog Handbook: Practical Advice on Creating and Maintaining Your Blog.” This stuff stands up.

bighow guides: the online journalism handbook citizen journalism basics
Includes links to some other helpful sites. I particularly like the brief mention of JD Lasica’s and Dan Gillmor’s “five basic principles of citizen journalism.”

Infinite Zoom: Journalism Basics
Journalist Curt Milton started a series on journalism basics on his blog Infinite Zoom, presumably targeted at bloggers. He didn’t get very far, but what’s there is worth looking at.

Citizen Media Law Project
A great resources. It is exactly what its name implies. If you’re not subscribing to the CitMedia blog, you should be.

Society of Professional Journalists: Code of Ethics
Hard to go wrong with the code of ethics of SPJ. It pretty much spells out the ethical issues — and it keeps it short and to the point.

Principles of Journalism | Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ)
Like the SPJ code, this is a great primer.

Richard Binhammer (Credit: www.briansolis.com via Flickr)

I came across the social media engagement report in July from Wetpaint and Altimeter focusing on how companies measure the bottom-line effectiveness of their social media efforts. The report focused on four companies — Dell, Starbucks, SAP and Toyota. The online database/website focuses on a great many more. To me, it’s not surprising that the study found…

…that the most valuable brands in the world are experiencing a direct correlation between top financial performance and deep social media engagement. The relationship is apparent and significant: socially engaged companies are in fact more financially successful. So now we know it pays to be social, but it is important to note that by “social,” we’re talking about deep engagement, not merely having a presence.

The report ranked the level of social engagement by various brands. Dell was second. That, of course, is noteworthy four years after the “Dell Hell” period, in which the company seemed to turn a deaf ear to the rage in the blogosphere over various customer service issues. Chief among the negative bloggers was Jeff Jarvis, who shared intimately his own customer service issues with Dell, and later declared an end to Dell Hell in Business Week after having an opportunity to interview Michael Dell himself and spend time at the company.

Not long after the Engagement report came out, I was offered the chance to speak to Richard Binhammer, Dell’s senior manager of corporate affairs. This was shortly after the uproar over the Washington Post’s social media guidelines for its newsroom. So it was amusing to see how open and engaged a massive company like Dell was willing to allow its employees to be.

Dell's Community Page

We also talked about Dell’s willingness to listen to — and host — readers’ comments on their various sites, which is something newspapers are still struggling with. Of course, Dell has also been willing to put resources behind its efforts, which at least 30 people who have responsibility for tending to the conversations the company has on its own community site, on Twitter, on Facebook and elsewhere. You can link to all Dell’s social spots from its community page.

Dell’s social media strategy falls under Binhammer’s domain. Binhammer comes out of public relations after working in Canadian politics. He had a two-year stint with Fleishman-Hillard in St. Louis from 1995 to 1997 and joined Dell in 2005 — right around the “Dell Hell” period, when he was given the assignment of dealing with the blogs that were talking about the company.

“It was an assignment I hadn’t asked for. I think I got the assignment because I was doing community affairs and we identified digital media at the time as almost community outreach. I think it was also my background in politics and issues management.”

Binhammer is accessible at his personal blog, on Facebook, LinkedIn, FriendFeed and Twitter. Here’s a few other highlights from our conversation.

On corporate social media policies.
“Every business has its employees sign some sort of employment contract or code of conduct. We ask employees not to divulge proprietary information, or badmouth competitors. My argument  is you already have rules and regulations that govern how to represent the company. In terms of representing the company, be smart, don’t be stupid. Are there times when people make mistakes? Absolutely. And we learn from them.”

Does Dell have a guideline for social media?
“There is a policy that we call the Policy on Electronic Dialog. You need to make it clear that you speak for Dell and you have to live up to your obligations under the Dell Code of Conduct. We’re forcing the issue of transparency onto the web.”

But in general, “Do you give (your employees) guidelines when they take an employee to lunch or speaks to someone on the telephone? I know I have to live up certain standards with respect to our own code of conduct. How does social media become different?

“If you are a person in the company who is going to both upload under your blog and have pictures of your kids online, but you’re also going to talk to datacenter IT managers about issues around green data centers, he does have to identify himself as a Dell employee. And I think that’s OK because it humanizes the company.”

On community ambassadors. Dell’s community website lists bios for 30 of them.
“That page is probably being redone, because some of it has changed around a bit. The number is plus or minus a few. What’s happened is that at one time we had a very centralized team and what we’ve done is started to spin off a lot of that team into the various business units. As Dell reorganized into four larger business units — consumer, public sector, small/medium business, large enterprise — that’s how we’ve changed. We’ve been driving deeper into the business at it relates to social media. There are still 30-some people. Some have jobs mostly involved in community forums. It all depends on the business.

“The other thing that is of interest, we also know of about a hundred individuals on Twitter that are using Twitter. For example, there is JohnBatdell …who focuses on the gaming community. Not only does he attend gaming conferences and send reports and interact with the gaming community there, but he’s on gaming blogs.

“I think it’s interesting because if it was five years ago or even three years ago and two customers were having a conversation in a Starbucks, I can’t hear that conversation or hear that conversation. But if they’re exchanging that on the web, I can become part if it and contribute or learn from it. That whole part of listening is a competitive advantage.

“Businesses are used to hosting the dinner party. The situation has fundamentally changed. The dinner party is being held and we’re guests.”

How much traffic goes through the Dell Community web site — page views and unique visitors?
“I don’t know the answer to that question. It’s not Dell.com. But it gets enough that it’s important to us.”

Can you quantify how much money your social media efforts have generated?
“@DellOutlet (on Twitter) has generated over $2 million in revenue in a year-and-a-half. It was $500,000 and then suddenly it was a million in half-the time.

“People are also following the DellOutlet link on Twitter, then going on to Dell.com.” Binhammer explains that readers will click on a link for a deal they’re offering; if they buy from DellOutlet, that contributes to the $2 million. Reader also come in through that link, and may not purchase and outlet item, but they’ll slide over to the main Dell.com and purchase something new. “It’s having a spinoff effect.”

On the effectiveness of Twitter versus conventional advertising.
“The important thing to remember about DellOutlet is that it is an outlet for returned products. We take it back, it’s never been used.” So, he says, he may never know at any one moment how much inventory he has, how many clearance items. “Taking an ad in the paper isn’t effective….I can clear them on Twitter and they go out the door that day.”

On non-revenue benefits to being involved in social media.
“We always think in terms of the revenue benefit, but there are other benefits as well. By listening and learning you can become a better company. You can always improve. You can only improve your business processes by garnering that kind of direct feedback. That’s a business improvement that can be realized by solid listening and learning.

“In some cases, we’ve heard about those kinds of cases (customer issues) sooner on the web than we would have otherwise — we’ve tracked it to a three-week advantage in some cases. If an issue bubbles up — say a driver (conflict with) a mouse — suddenly a little issue bubbles up. Normally that would bubble up through the call lines. By the time that gets aggregated and goes to the engineers, sometimes this gives us three-week advantage.”

On the initial blogger relations program. How did it work?
“Here’s the history. In the first part of 2006, we established essentially some tech savvy and people savvy team members into what you might call a SWAT team. They began filtering various searches to identify customers who were having issues and/or blogging about them. They would go in and help solve the problem. Some were simple issues where people didn’t know they needed to get a driver update. That came directly from Michael (Dell). People can phone us and go to our forums. If people are blogging about us, we need to be there.

“In June 2006, we started blogging (the direct2dell blog). And then in August 2006, we established a broader view. It’s more than just customer support. They’re interacting with us in all sorts of ways, why would we not extend this beyond just tech support. We broadened our blog outreach to whatever other issues they might be talking about. For example, people were talking about whether it was right for us to be in Walmart — Dell’s strength was always in direct to the customer…

“In the early days, in early 2006, almost 50 percent of what we saw on the web about the company was negative. We’ve seen it decline at least 30 percentage points — it ebbs and flows depending on different things. The metrics aren’t perfect. We try to capture most of the conversations.”

On allowing customer comments on blogs, in forums.
“In the ratings and reviews in Dell.com — low ratings aren’t deleted, but we reach out to those customers and see what we can do to fix that problem. Now if you bought a low-end product and are expecting to do high-end work with us, there is a bit of a conflict there.

“It’s also important to remember in social media is that social media is not just a way to say yes for companies. There are some people who make negative comments that don’t really comprehend the whole picture or have a complete understanding. When you go in an explain that, that’s often very helpful. I’m not saying that deals with all negative commentary. I remember one blogger — when Michael came back as CEO — this blogger wrote that Michael Dell needed to understand his company had a customer service issue.” But what the blogger could see in public coverage of his return didn’t include any mention of the issue to his employees.

Binhammer said he reached out to the blogger with evidence to the contrary. “You need to see what he had to say to Fortune two months ago,” and the entirety of Michael’s email. “The next day that blogger wrote ‘this blogger stands corrected.’”

On being Dell’s social media guru.
“I’m part of a team. I happen to be the forward-looking face for a lot of the team and I became part of the team early. I’m not the guru, I’m just one of many. I come out of a public relations background.”