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Dell publicity goes ‘Kaboom!’
If you Google “Dell” and “Exploding laptop,” you get about 299,000 results, many from blogs and news sources detailing an incident in Japan (caught, unluckily for the company, in photos and posted online) in which a Dell Inc. laptop burst into flames. (See the original Web item here.)
An investigation by engineers concluded that it was the fault of a bad battery, but it was one of two incidents, another involving a bad chip, in a very short time. Despite the millions of nonexploding computers the company sells, the blogosphere, as it is wont to do, is going to latch onto the two machines that did catch fire.
The mainstream media has detailed Dell’s publicity woes as well, including the dust-up between the company and financial analysts, one of whom alerted clients to the potentially bad publicity the exploding laptop seen round the world might cause.
Given that many of its customers probably haven’t even heard about the Japan incident, it’s tough to say what the financial impact will be, but it comes at a time when the company is trying to repair bad buzz about its tech support service, which it has said it will invest $100 million to address.
Is it fair that two laptops flambé out of millions should result in such bad publicity? No, not at all. But as Dell has surely learned over the years, the Web is hardly a fair place. Good luck with that ad campaign.
UPDATE: Blogger Jeff Beckham points out Dell’s new official blog, “One2One,” which just launched this week.
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