Dell’s Richard Binhammer was the guest speaker of Third Tuesday Ottawa this past Monday (don’t ask). At its core, his was a presentation about corporate attitudes and values and it was loaded with interesting case studies, insights and guidance on using social technologies to transform customer experiences.

There were many interesting ‘take-aways’ from Richard’s talk including that if I put certain Dell-specific keywords in this post, I’m guaranteed a response from Dell. To avoid misdirecting Dell resources I won’t test the theory.

Perhaps the most significant point is that Dell is RE-defining itself as a listening company. They’re using their own blog and tools like Google Alerts, Technorati, del.icio.us and Yahoo Pipes to follow and actively participate in ‘the conversation’.

During the interactive portion of the talk, a member of the audience challenged Richard on whether Dell plays the numbers game to determine which online activity to monitor and respond to. The argument was that Dell must be basing their decisions on social ranking such as those determined by Google and Technorati — a decidedly archaic approach to marketing. Richard replied by saying that you never know which blog post is going to take off so the significance of any Dell-related comment, good or bad, is the same no matter who posts it — an approach that respects the Cluetrain Manifesto and The Long Tail and, more importantly, the customer.

I caught up on Richard’s blog as part of my wake-up this morning and discovered this video. Whether you believe it or not, it’s a great inspirational-kick-start for your day… brought to you by Dell.

During a summer job in the late 1980’s, I was introduced to a book called Creating the Service Culture in which author Stanley Brown argued that products were becoming increasingly homogeneous and that real business success would ultimately come from a commitment to service. A series of events in the last two days have demonstrated that the open source software movement and members of social media have embraced, perhaps even defined, the service culture.

It started yesterday when I stumbled upon a problem that prevented visitors of several of my blogs from downloading episodes of my podcasts that were older than thirty days. I thought the problem originated with Libsyn (monthly rates of US$5 through US$50), so I contacted their support team. Within ninety-minutes I received a response that demonstrated they had done some troubleshooting and had isolated the problem to a specific misconfiguration on my end. They were right! I was puzzled why something that had worked properly for about a year suddenly stopped. No matter, I thought, the problem is now solved.

Later in the day, I checked out the Technorati status for one of my podcast sites and found that Technorati (free social media tool) thought I hadn’t posted to the site in 301 days despite having made at least three posts a week since last summer. I sent an email to support to report the problem and three hours later received a response that they had identified a problem and fixed it.

Today, I discovered that that same podcast had a broken feed. I did some quick troubleshooting and isolated the problem to the latest version of podPress (free open source application). I contacted Dan (creator of podPress) using GChat and he responded immediately, working with me to troubleshoot and solve the problem in real time! It’s worth noting that this was not the first time Dan has helped me out in a pinch in this way.

If you’re looking for the service culture, it’s alive and well in the grassroots community.

If I’ve learned anything in the last few weeks, it’s to get on the social media networking bandwagon.  So, I’m working on building my knowledge of Technorati, Digg, del.icio.us and LinkedIn.

As proof, I’m using this post to claim my Technorati Profile.