• by Mark Walsh  @markfwal, April 7, 2009

Bob Pearson, who helped reverse Dell's poor reputation for customer service by embracing social media, has left the computer giant to become president of the Blog Council, an offshoot of word-of-mouth-marketing company GasPedal.

The 46-member Council is composed of the heads of social media for Fortune 1000 companies including Cisco, GE, Dell, Microsoft, Wells Fargo, The Home Depot and Procter & Gamble. The group focuses on establishing best practices for blogging and social media within large corporations.

As vice president, communities and conversations at Dell, Pearson ramped up the company's social media efforts to combat the "Dell Hell" label applied by critics to its customer service operation. The company now boasts a 42-person social media team at Dell that runs blogs, a video channel and other forums as well as tracking what people are saying about the company.

"He's the first guy to build a big social media program at a big company," said Andy Sernovitz, CEO of GasPedal and the Blog Council. "This is an opportunity for Bob to help a lot of other companies figure out how to do the same thing."

Sernovitz said he expects the Blog Council, a for-profit operation started in 2007, to expand to "100 or 200" members by the end of 2009. A company membership costs $10,000 a year. Members have access to email discussion lists, participate in weekly phone conferences and meet four times a year.

"Bob will be growing that whole program," said Sernovitz. Despite the economic downturn, he doesn't expect corporations to cut back on social media efforts to focus on traditional marketing efforts. "Social media is not a marketing tactic anymore -- it is something that fundamentally transforms the entire enterprise," he said.

He noted that corporations are facing many of the same issues related to social media, such as developing policies and practices for individual departments and on employee disclosure and training. Sernovitz estimates that about 1 in 10 corporations have someone formally in charge of social media.