In my personal capacity I’ve been active on twitter since early 2008, admittedly after a false start and a 3 month period of ‘thinking’ how it would work for me. I have also played (and continue to play) a very active role in launching and developing a major entertainment brand on twitter (@5FM started tweeting in Oct 2008) and we’ve learned a LOT.
It makes sense that the more people and brands use twitter, the more the dynamics and ‘rules’ of the platform change. From a brand point of view, the strategy behind the how, why, and if, you should use Twitter has also shifted.
In my opinion a lot of brands are feeling pressured to have a twitter account, it’s the ‘everyone’s doing it why aren’t we’ mentality. They stumble onto twitter without a plan; with no idea of who to follow, or why, no content plan, no objectives and no link to their overall business objectives. They then pump out a few self-promotional tweets, and wait…..and wait, while they listen to the crickets.
In short, it often falls flat and this ‘social media’ stuff is then labelled as a crock of sh*t. These kind of interactions cheapen the medium and aggravate the industry.
I had a very brief conversation with Andy Hadfield a week or so back during which we questioned the validity of ‘service’ brands being active on twitter (think insurance and banking as a start.)
Consider this; most service brands are necessity / grudge purchases….you don’t want to actively follow these brands because (for the most part) it’s likely that they don’t really have content to tweet that will add value to your life. Admittedly this is a generalisation, and perhaps a cue (poke in the backside) for some local brands.
For service type brands if they’re on twitter it’s likely that the only @ replies they’ll get are customer complaints….and the occasional ‘thanks’ if they’ve acted proactively or responded swiftly. Is it worth for them? Consider that at this stage it’s likely that their call centre tech doesn’t track / log social media interactions, and twitter users are probably a drop in the ocean when compared to their total client base.
Add to this the fact that you may grossly underestimate the volume of customer complaints you get via twitter, as a result your response times and quality suffer, you waste time and valuable resources, do yourself an injustice and head back to square one.
The ‘rules’ that many of us applied to twitter a year back have started to become a bit blurry.
As a brand (and I’m talking about service brands in this case) is it perhaps better then to ‘listen’ to twitter and respond via traditional (phone / email) methods rather than have an active account? Most times, you’ll still receive the twitter kudos: Tweet 1: ‘ I hate xxx bank’ Tweet 2: ‘omg xxx bank just called me in response to my tweet #brandplus.’
Here’s another challenge: we sometimes moan about brands who do not follow back, but if people @ your brand, or if you’re tracking relevant search terms, you receive the tweet and can respond and then choose to follow. Following random people builds goodwill (and demonstrates etiquette) but does it make good business sense? Most of the biggest local ‘celeb’ users on twitter only follow a handful of people for this reason, following masses of people clogs the feed and conversations (value) become lost.
On a wider note, FB+Twitter does not = a social media strategy, there are other, interesting, brand appropriate ways of starting brand conversations online. Just because a brand does not actively tweet (I’m choosing the social network of the *moment* as an example) doesn’t necessarily mean they’re ignoring social media.
I’m merely voicing some of my own observations and posing some questions….I have plenty more to say on the subject, I just felt the need to post this as a start.
Filed under: Campaigns, Local branding, social media, South Africa, twitter Tagged: | brands, service industry, social media, South Africa, twitter, web2.0
It has become commonplace that if I have a temper tantrum on twitter re #FNB or #paypal issues, that this is escalated to some higher internal being and I eventually have someone contact me to to resolve my issue.
Don’t get me wrong, resolving problems is good! This gives me the warm and fuzzies, and I really appreciate your pioneering efforts FNB but strategically and practically, it makes no sense for you to have your CEO / GMs contact me directly. I am not worth wasting the time of seriously strategic players who should be focusing on more important organisational matters.
If it wasn’t for the fact that @RBJacobs is a clone and has several incarnations of himself scanning the interwebs, ‘he’ would have probably hanged himself by now.
SystemicLogic recently conducted the 2010 Innovation Study and the results showed that 37% of interviewees hated their banks because of their customer service, but customer service hardly resonates with anyone when they are asked about the criteria that makes their bank innovative (4%).
My point is (and supports Mel’s rhetoric) that if you give people the mic, re service industry brands, they are more likely to rant negatively than constructively.
By all means, LISTEN to what is being said about your brand and have a strategy for resolving issues via calls, emails, DMs, etc but if presence on any platform does not support your business objectives and you are doing this as a ‘me-too’ tactic, you are seriously wasting your time, and dividing your internal efforts.
Internal comms is extremely important too, to communicate to your workforce the reasons behind your adoption of a specific platform or not. Everyone in the organisation needs buy-in – not just the customer.
I am part of a corporate training company, which would fall under the service industry, but is not necessarily a grudge purchase, and I have been looking at how best to use twitter to generate bookings. And to be honest i have drawn a blank.
So i would have to say i agree with the posts above, that twitter is not a medium to be used by the service industry to generate business through hard selling. But, as stated above, is better utilised as a means to generate discussion and try to find out what your customers are looking for, what makes them happy and what rubs them the wrong way.
By the same token, once you put yourself out there on such a dynamic and immediate tool, you do need to remember that people want instant responses. So it is definitely a choice that needs to be weighed carefully before diving in.
Thanks for an interesting post.