Embracing Twitter as a Business Tool  

Posted by Kuljit to General on May 22nd, 2009  

I’ve always been skeptical about social networking sites.  Out of my colleagues and friends I was last to get a MySpace page (now gone) and the last to get a Facebook page. Neither really captured my imagination. I’ve only recently joined Twitter and really really enjoy it, it’s a great way to keep in touch with friends and family as most people already know. I use Twitter a lot more than I do Facebook and MySpace. Funnily enough Facebook have also introduced a micro-blogging tool in their interface to try and steal some of the action from Twitter.

It’s also great for business. Twitter’s growth statistics speak for themselves. Nielsen Online reported recently that in the past 12 months Twitter grew by 1,689% from February 2008 to February 2009. That’s an amazing amount. To go from 100,000 users to 1.78 million speaks volumes. The visitor stats make compelling reading. In less than 3 years they've become the third most visited social networking site in the United States of America. I remember not so long ago there were stories on the internet of disgruntled staff leaving Twitter for a variety of reasons. Some might remember Blaine Cook departed because of service reliability issues. That was big news back then and it looked certain that Twitter was going to implode.

Yes I know, this is another blog post on the interweb about Twitter but instead of me telling you how good it is and why everyone should be using it, I’m going to describe something that happened to me over Twitter recently which left me impressed, surprised and slightly confused at the same time.

I work for a branding agency in Scotland, quite a big one at that. As such we’ve done a fair few websites for clients and it’s important to ensure that those sites are up and running consistently.

Recently I’ve had some issues with our hosting which is provided by Mosso. Rather comically a quick Google search for ‘Mosso’ the first sponsored result reads “Is your server down?”.

Mosso, up until recently, have been pretty good to work with. Their technical support was always reliable and seemed to get the job done when they were required the most. Recently though things seem to have taken a downward turn there. Their tech support no longer seem interested. The majority of issues we’ve had over the last 6 months have been resolved by ourselves and it now seems as though the only thing they know how to do that I don’t is get the damn error logging working for PHP. But I digress.

I posted a tweet on Twitter, a rather immature one at that, which simply read “Mosso, you suck!”. I felt slightly better it has to be said, letting a little steam off and all that. No more than an hour or two later I received a tweet from Mosso themselves saying that they were sorry I was having issues and asking if there was anything that they could do to help. I didn’t reply, instead waited a while so that I could thing of a response. But before I could respond I received a phone call from another hosting company. They called me at work. The lady on the phone went through her sales pitch mentioning that they were one of Mosso’s biggest competitors and that they had a lot of former Mosso customers switch over to their service. All I could think of was how did she know I was a disgruntled Mosso customer and how on Earth did she get my office number.

After she finished her pitch I asked her how she got my number? I wasn’t angry just curious. She told me that she had seen my tweet, went to my profile page and clicked the link to my personal site, browsed around and found the company that I work for, got the phone number for the office, called and asked for KJ. I was impressed. Sure it’s not a complex procedure and anyone could do it, but the fact that she did and made the effort I was more than happy to let her send me some information about her company.

Twitter, originally designed for networking and keeping friends and family up to date with your doings, has now obviously been embraced by big business and it’s a wise move. When people, like me, are pissed off about something and they have a Twitter account they are more than likely going to let people know.  Businesses are now looking at Twitter as a way of providing secondary technical support and customer service. They are also using Twitter as a way of finding new business and it makes total sense.

Garnter released a short report detailing how business are embracing Twitter to their advantage.

Despite the fact that Twitter is primarily aimed at individual users in the consumer market, many of those individuals work for companies and ‘tweet’ about business issues, leading businesses to explore how they could best use it,” said Jeffrey Mann, research vice president at Gartner.

Perhaps the time is soon upon us where Twitter becomes the avenue for ensuring customer satisfaction in future. Not only is the user happy when the receive help, advice or apology but by publicly appeasing unhappy customers the business improves its own public image in the eyes of the users contacts and goes someway to countering negative publicity surrounding the business.

As long as the line between spam and genuine lines of inquiry are not crossed then I don’t see this as a problem for me. In fact, this might be an avenue we'd pursue as a way of keeping in contact with clients.

Just a thought.