The rise of the fifth estate

In 1787 a Mr Burke, referring to the French Parliament, said that there were Three Estates; but, in the Reporters' Gallery yonder, there sat a Fourth Estate more important far than they all. This fourth estate was the press and, since then, many writers, first among them Thomas Carlyle in his book 'On heroes and hero worship', started to use the expression 'fourth estate' to refer to the ability of the press to influence the electorate and, more in general, the public opinion.

Making a parallelism, we might say that today we assist at the rise of the Fifth Estate, Internet and, within its universe, a particular channel of communication: the social media. I am not saying this because I am a blogger - as a matter of fact defining myself a blogger would be too presumptuos. Nonetheless, without any doubt, in the last years bloggers have proved to have an unprecedented capacity of influencing the series of events in everyday's life and changing the course of history, at least for some individuals and companies. This last statement could look too extreme until we consider Mr Jeff Javis's blog buzzmachine and his Dell Hell's saga.

Mr Javis was the super unlucky purchaser of a Dell Pc back in 2005. Super unlucky because not only the machine was a DOA (defective on arrival), but proved to be a persistent DOA case as, each time Dell's customer service fixed the issue and returned the machine to Javis, a new problem popped up driving crazy the poor owner. Javis started to share his painful experience on his blog and at this point something unexpected, at least by Dell, happened: the victim became the executioner and the other way round.

Well, the word of mouth about Dell's poor performance spreaded all around the web massively and brought together other- until that moment-unlistened Dell's customers,. The snowball effect was such that the stock price of the PC manufacturer sunk miserably and Michael Dell returned to run the company after 3 years trying to implement recovery actions.

But what has happened here exactly?

In the example of Dell, its late response to what was going on the web created huge damages in term of reputation and, therefore, economic performance.
Eventually Dell has learnt its lessons as it is proved by its deep social media engagement (eg in 2006 they created an official customer service blog, in 2007 they launched IdeaStorm and StudioDell. IdeaStorm allows Dell users to feedback valuable insights about the company and its products and vote for those they find most relevant. StudioDell is a place where Dell users could share videos about Dell- related topics). This type of actions proved that not only they have understood how much power the consumers/bloggers have, they have also seized another more important concept: if you can't beat them, join them.

By involving and engaging their customers, opening to them and being ready to share issues and accepting honest feedback, Dell has been capable of re-building its reputation.

Overall, the take away of this episode is that social media have proved to be not simply a 'way of killing spare time', they are much powerful means of expression which cannot be any longer ignored by whom has a public image, be those companies, institutions, organisations, political leaders and so on.