Probably many of you by now, who are starting to gain followers into the triple digits find that when you throw something out there into the “twitterverse” people are actually listening to what you’re saying. But sometimes, people are listening that aren’t even following you – for example, companies who use search and RSS capabilities to find out who is talking about their brand.
This has happened to me more than a couple of times – and both times, it took me by surprise. The first time this happened (it’s quite funny looking back on it – but at the time, I put my foot in my mouth!) I was pointing out the irony that a certain video company was using another company’s video tool for a demo of the product on their site. Turns out, both tools are made by the same company – as they tweeted back to me to point this out. (I’m not going to mention what companies, but you could easily find out who I am talking about from my Twitter stream) So, yes, I was humbled, apologized, and hopefully I am not on anyone’s black-list.
The second time was with 12seconds.tv. I mentioned that my browser was having a particular hard time with their site and kept crashing when I was trying to record a video. I believe not less than an hour went by and the co-founder, Sol Lipman (@thesolster) tweeted me back to ask me more about what was wrong and how he could help. I started realizing how great Twitter can be as a customer service tool for businesses.
While installing the Tweetube application on my Mac, I ran into a small installation problem. Nothing big, but it was probably a simple issue that was easily fixable. I threw out to Twitter the problem I was having installing the app and again, for a THIRD time, received a kind reply from the makers asking how they could help. “Wow,” I thought to myself. “This is incredible!”
The fourth time I did this, I did it more on purpose to see if this platform really worked. Firefox 3’s StumbleUpon add-on has, for awhile now, supported saving ‘favorited’ pages to your own bookmarks. I like Firefox 3, but I enjoy Flock a little better – and so far it has supported just about every add-on that’s made for Firefox 3. However, I pointed out that Flock’s StumbleUpon add-on didn’t have the same functions as the Firefox 3 StumbleUpon add-on. An online buddy of mine also retweeted my tweet and sure enough, a few hours later and Flock was asking how they could help. As of this post, I believe they are looking into why the Firefox 3 add-on is not working the same in Flock.
So that, my Twitter friends, is customer service – Twitter style! Don’t get me wrong, I have sent emails to companies from their contact/feedback pages in the past. Sometimes I get a response, sometimes I don’t (an automated response doesn’t count as a real response, by the way!). But so far, 4 out of 4 companies from my examples are listening on Twitter – as they should be. And I guess that’s the point that I am getting to – if you are a business, whatever size that you are – get on Twitter, and keep your ear on the tweets!
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