(Lenderman 2006). No case better illustrates the speed at which negative word of mouth can diffuse than the story of Jeff Jarvis and his cyber-assault on Dell Computers. In 2005, Jeff Jarvis had a dreadful experience with his new Dell laptop computer. The customer service he received in response to his ongoing technical issues further tested the limits of his patience. As awful as his experience was, it would eventually pale in comparison to the pain that Jarvis would inflict on Dell. Jarvis was not just a disgruntled Dell customer. He was also a blogger. His string of Dell Hell blogs chronicling his frustrations and Dell’s customer service failures triggered a chain of events. Dell Hell was soon a topic of discussion at tech conferences and marketing conventions, as well as the subject of stories in the Washington Post, New York Times and Wall Street Journal. Within a year of Jarvis’s first blog entry, Google counted 10 million references to Dell Hell and Dell’s stock price had fallen 45% as thousands of fellow Dell Hell dwellers chimed in to the conversation that Jarvis spurred (McConnell & Huba 2007). Figure 1.3 represents Dell’s stock value 11 months before Jarvis’s first blog post, one month after the day Jarvis posted his first cyber-rant, and 13 months following that fateful day. Figure 1.4 represents the decline in value during the five months immediately following the first blog post when anti-Dell sentiment activity on Jarvis’s blog, BuzzMachine, was high. Figure 1.3
Figure 1.4
DELL STOCK 6/21/05-11/21/05
DELL STOCK 7/21/04-7/21/06 50 40
35.51 7-21-04
30 20 10
41.25 7-21-05 19.91 7-21-06
50 40 30 20 10 0
40.42 41.25 36.28 33.36 32.05 30.04
0 Source: finance.Yahoo.com
Both charts depict a sharp decline in the wake of Jarvis’s Dell Hell campaign. On July 21, 2006, 13 months after Jarvis’s social media campaign had begun, Dell’s stock value dropped to its lowest level since the weeks following the tragedy of 9-11. Certainly there were other mitigating factors behind Dell’s woes. Jarvis was not the only force acting on Dell to cause such a drop. But as Jarvis would later point out, “We are in the new era of ‘seller beware.’ Now when you screw your customers, your customer can fight back and publish and organize” (McConnell & Huba 2007). Dell’s stock quotes were not the only evidence of the Dell Hell campaign’s impact. Almost a year after Jarvis’s first post, Dell announced that it would invest $100 million to improve customer service, launched its own blog, and hired resolution experts to address customer service inquires and concerns (McConnell & Huba 2007). Louise Lee outlined
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