Dell Builds Social Media Control Centre - Should You?

Gatorade was the first company to implement a social media monitoring center, a department dedicated to listening in on the 'social conversation', and last week saw Dell announce their own social media 'command center', the second of its kind in the world.I spoke to Richard Binehammer, part of Dell's social media team, regarding the launch of Dell's command center. He spoke to me about their desire to embed social media across the fabric of the company; connecting with customers to listen, engage and act on every facet of business, using the Web to build stronger customer connections and constantly improve its business. Dell has called in the team from Radian6 to build a custom monitoring tool just for them.The @dellcares twitter account is only one aspect of the social media command center. Dell has social media representatives across the business, so if needed these representatives can join any online conversation that is Dell-related and they hope this new center will make it easier to achieve that. The new social media business unit boasts a team of full time staff, who monitor online conversations around the clock and support up to 11 languages.It's great to see that companies are seeing the importance of tracking and monitoring their brands online. Do I believe companies need to build their own command centers? Well, it depends largely on the sorts of services you provide and how many people consume your products. It makes sense that Dell implements this on such a massive scale, given their consistently high ranking in the PC industry, but this level of monitoring and scrutiny certainly isn't necessary for everybody.For companies that are just starting out, there are plenty of free tools that allow you to track online conversations. Facebook 'post insights' and Twitter search may not give you beautifully laid-out statistics but are great tools to begin monitoring your company's social capital. There's no need to spend a huge chunk of money on a monitoring tool, especially when there are plenty of free alternatives.It will be interesting to see how companies adapt to the growing importance of monitoring conversations about their brands on social media in 2011.