Dell social media is soooo 2007 - What about Joe's House of Sushi?

Dell has received a lot of high praise for its social media efforts since the beginning of 2007, especially since the launch of the Dell community site IdeaStorm (where, among other activities, members can give and vote on Dell product ideas):
- Jon Fortt from Fortune Magazine featured Dell in his Sept 4 piece on how Dell has listened to and communicated with customers online on IdeaStorm, Facebook, Twitter, etc.
- Dell has won a number of awards, including the 2007 Forrester Groundswell Award; the Wired.com 2008 Rheingold Award; and the 2008 PR Week "PR Innovation of the Year 2008".

So Dell gets social media. Dell gets media. Or maybe Dell gets self promotion. As Fortt's article points out:

The real question is whether customer-friendly operations like IdeaStorm translate to better financials. The jury's still out on that. (Dell's gross margins have increased to 19.1%, up from 16.6% last year, thanks mostly to cost cutting. Staying at that level won't be easy - Dell has been lowering prices, which helped cause a 17% fall in profits last quarter.) The jury's also out on whether IdeaStorm reflects the opinions of the average Dell buyer. Many of the sites' most popular ideas involve adding the open-source Linux operating system instead of Windows. If IdeaStorm votes were a true gauge of customers, Linux PCs should be flying off the shelves. They're not. "How much better is this as a way to measure customer demand?" wonders Mike Gotta, analyst at Burton Group, a consulting firm. "It's not proven yet."

Or we could take a look at the Dell stock price since the social media campaign started in early 2007 (note the increase of stock price from around $26 in early 2007 to about $26 in Sept 2008 before last week's financial madness):



I wonder if there is another, less-hyped business that deserves as much visibility as Dell for its social media efforts. Or maybe thousands of businesses. My colleague recently blogged on how her friends are getting responses from restaurant owners after posting restaurant reviews/comments on Yelp. In one case, a person complained about a restaurant opening - and was offered up free food by the restaurant.

So as we wait for Dell financials to prove out that their much celebrated online initiatives make business sense - maybe we look toward the work of small restaurant owners for true social media innovation. Unless of course they go out of business giving away free food.