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A couple of months ago, the battery on my relatively new laptop died. The manufacturer promptly sent me a replacement and asked only that I return the defective battery equally promptly. No big deal, right? As things turned out, it was a big deal, requiring multiple phone calls over the course of several days - just to find a customer service agent who knew the address where to send the dead battery.

I twittered about my frustration (and amazement) that customer service didn't seem to know its own address, at one point comparing my experience with that of Dell owners in the pre-Jeff Jarvis days. Almost immediately, I got a tweet back from @RichardatDELL, who monitors the social media space for mentions of Dell. His response was an ironic "thanks for bringing up the bad old days" note, even though clearly my frustration had to do with a competitor, not Dell itself. We exchanged another round of light-hearted tweets and that was the end of it.

My interaction with Dell brings up some vital issues about the blurring lines between social media monitoring, management and marketing. The value inherent in monitoring online social spaces is hard to overlook. Not only does it provide an early-warning system against possible brand threats but it also can provide a wellspring of valuable information about where consumers' interests lie and what products or features they'd like to see from a favorite brand.

To keep an eye on online conversations, Dell uses Visible Technologies' TruCast monitoring platform, one of the many I recently evaluated. It has an impressive-looking user interface and a very useful mechanism for responding to and tracking subsequent interactions with individual bloggers (although it does not yet permit direct replies on Twitter). No doubt TruCast and/or one of the free Twitter-specific scanning tools like Tweet Scan helped alert @RichardatDELL that I was talking about Dell.

Online monitoring is just the first stage. Online brand management takes the game to a different level with a number of facets. On one hand, content creation and optimization or even the strategic use of paid media can help to mitigate negative results or promote positive news. On the other, brand management requires people skilled at outreach and interaction with online communities, each of which has a distinct constituency, rules and modes of expression.

At this more personal level, the line between social media monitoring/management and social media marketing can start to blur. In my interaction with @RichardatDELL, I had clearly expressed dissatisfaction with my laptop, which was made by a Dell competitor, and our back-and-forth conversation could have opened the door to a marketing opportunity. However, while social media seem to be ideal for the kind of one-to-one marketing that brands dream about, they aren't always well suited for it. More specifically, it's hard to know when or even if to inject marketing into the "conversation." 

In my specific example, an offer from Dell presented over Twitter would have been a turn-off since I regarded our conversation as precisely that, but that's just me. Someone else in my situation might have felt or reacted differently. This is where the challenge lies, and marketers and consumers are still feeling their way without much in the way of roadmap.

All of this leads me to wonder whether I'll be hearing from @RichardatDELL again soon....