Online Customer Service: How Tweet It Is
We use the term Web 2.0 around here with a bit of a chuckle, because it doesn’t actually mean anything specific. It is a constantly changing and evolving buzzword for way to interact with others online.
Which, for businesses, means interactive marketing and public relations. And because of it, branding has never been more vital than it is right now.
Search Engines, bloggers and chat rooms have made brand reputation one of the most important aspects in success or failure in this Web 2.0 world. A brand’s reputation used to be defined solely by product quality and the message a company pushed out from its headquarters. There were very few avenues for consumers to find out about product quality, good or bad, without shelling out the money to buy it. Clever 30-second TV spots, slick magazine advertising and a good training program for the staff could cover a multitude of sins. Today, pissing off the wrong person, such as a blogger, can cause irreparable harm to a brand’s reputation.
Restaurants and moviemakers have known this for a long time. A bad review in the Sunday paper could always do far more harm to a film or eatery than a good review could help.
If your company doesn’t have a two-way interaction going on with your customers and potential customers, you are way behind the curve. And the companies who are setting the curve are finding more and faster ways to respond to their customer’s needs. Case in point: Twitter.
For the uninitiated, Twitter is a micro-blogging site that asks the question, “What are you doing?” And the posts, or “tweets,” are limited to no more than 140 characters. You decide whose updates to follow, and it becomes sort of an ongoing, online chat fest.
Many companies, LinkedIn, H. R. Block and Southwest among the most notable, have Community Managers who follow what people are saying about them on Twitter. This allows them to contact, (instantly in some cases) folks who are having problems. For instance, Helen Mosher, who blogs at The Mosher Pit, had trouble with a company called Mixx, and wrote a short tweet about it to vent her frustration. What happened next surprised her.
“Next thing I knew, Mixx had added me on Twitter. The good folks at Mixx asked what hiccup I had run across. I was very impressed: within a few minutes of making a complaint about a technology, the technology folks approached me with “Hey, I see you had trouble with our platform. What can we do to make it better?”Â
OMG if VW had done this with me when my Jetta was made of fail, I might not be driving a Toyota today!”Â
Twitter can also be used as a direct marketing tool, something Southwest occasionally does, to announce sales and specials to its Twitter followers (which includes me).
Obviously, if Twitter’s popularity continues to grow, the logistics of following your products and services in real time may become impractical. That is what traditional customer service channels are for. But tech-geek early adopters will always be looking for the next new social media communications platform. And smart companies will follow them there, too. And if done well, it will only help their brand reputation.
If you need help integrating your company into the ever-evolving world of Social Media networking, send me an email at jim at fb-i dot com. Or, if you’re already on Twitter, shout out a tweet to @jimreams. Maybe you’ll end up with some Frank/Best drumsticks.
(This is the blog for Frank Best International, an advertising agency in Nashville, Tennessee. This post was written by Jim Reams, Twitter Geek.)
Friday, April 18th, 2008
