This information is 100% stolen from trendwatching.com
Here are some conversations that have been collected from twitter where big brands are monitoring the conversation and responding in real time to customer service issues.
Five years ago if your company had world class customer service that meant you had some good information on your website and customers could call your toll free number 24/7
Today? you can no longer afford to wait for customers to bring their complaints to you. If you are waiting to solve problems you are losing customers. You must be proactive about listening to the conversations and responding in real time. Twitter is an amazing tool for this. Here are some awesome examples from big brands.
Let me just qualify that and say I am throwing in the big brands thing to show that this behavior is now mainstream not that you need a big budget. We have clients doing this way better than the big boys with micro brands and micro budgets. check out zarbees on twitter.
Chances are your company or cause is much smaller than these. Can you really afford not to be part of the conversation?
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{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
Whole Foods may be on Twitter, but they are not responding to my multiple requests for additional information.
Its good for companies to be on twitter but its still a popularity game where whoever has the most followers gets the most attention or response to complaints that they make about them. Because if the complaints that people are making aren’t being seen by people who have a large following they discount them as unimportant.
The small groups are the people that they should be worried about because if you collect all those small groups they’re much larger than that one person.
Thats my two scents.
Although I agree Twitter can be a great real-time tool to solve customer service issues and definitely a media channel to watch for all companies big and small, I think it´s important to emphasize that social media indeed cost money.
Also, the product or service characteristics are important to consider in the media mix. Social media seldom scale well and for products and services with mass market products it´s by no means a “one tool fix all” situation. Wrote a blog post about this a few weeks ago:
http://tongstromberg.com/2010/01/02/social-media-soap/
I love showing clients screenshots like those so they can see concrete examples of what twitter is capable of doing for their PR.