Does every department in a company need to understand social media?

Last week, Consumerist posted a long, somewhat standard piece titled “22 Confessions of a former Dell Sales Manager.” It followed the same format as Consumerist’s other “confessions” type stories: an employee (or former employee) of a company passes along information that could benefit consumers when they go out to purchase whatever product. As far as these types of “confessions” pieces go, this one was pretty tame and didn’t seem to include any information that a reasonably savvy consumer wouldn’t have already either thought of themselves or perhaps come across in another setting.

In other words, the piece was well on its way to being a one-day post.

So, what did Dell do? Why, they had one of their attorneys send a letter demanding that Consumerist take down the piece, of course. As Mike at Techdirt points out this just accelerated the interest in it, and the story became a criticism of Dell for being so heavy-handed.

Dell has had run-ins with blogs before, and I find it stunning that they didn’t see this coming. While I’m sure they had their reasons for issuing the takedown request, this piece just doesn’t seem like it rose to the level that would require such action, particularly since one would assume that they did realize that there was a risk of a blogstorm and decided to go ahead with it anyway.

This begs the question; does every department in a company—including legal—need to understand the risks and rewards of social media? Confining an understanding of social media to areas such as communications, PR, and marketing leaves other areas (such as legal) potentially open to making missteps, such as this one by Dell.