Saturday, February 12, 2011

The Power of Twitter Feeds

An interesting thing happened yesterday when I ranted and moaned about eircom (@eircom) - Customer Update from eircom - "Things can only get worse!". I got a reaction from eircom via email and Twitter within an hour! Two things caused this to happen: the first is that my blog posts are automatically fed to Twitter, where my tweet was picked up by @eircom who must be still following me from the time last year when they tried to resolve my broadband connection problems. The second is my blog post was read by someone within eircom who quickly emailed me after they "came across your blog today regarding your on going problems with your BB connection that we are providing" - and offered to help again.

Logo from Twitterfeed.com homepage.
I use Twitterfeed to automatically tweet my blog posts as a tweet - saves me tweeting the same thing on Twitter. It also feeds my Facebook page and posts to my Wall - this is just about the only activity that I have on Facebook. It is a cool way to ensure that one blog post ends up in three locations (Blogger, Twitter, and Facebook) - and maintains activity on Twitter/Facebook without the need to log on to either site. My blog posts also end up on Buzz and Linkedin which manages the feed itself.

Customers now have more power than ever. Calling a Support line means that only you and the Support Rep hear the conversation. While "calls may be recorded" - the customer's complaints are only heard by one person. Even if a customer calls several times with the most justifiable of complaints, companies can manage and control the complaint - and who hears it.

Suddenly, putting a complaint out in the open on Blogger, Twitter, and Facebook gives the customer more power. Companies, like eircom, see that a customer is saying bad things about them in the Blogosphere/Twitterland - and they are obviously motivated to reduce retweets, sharing, and the viral spread of bad comment. By putting a twitter username (@eircom in my case) at the beginning of a blog post (in the first 140 characters), or a hashtag, ensures that more people will see the post. And grabs more attention.

10 out of 10 to eircom for the quick response!

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