How Corporations Can Use Twitter to Improve Customer Service

November 3, 2009 By 1 Comment

This post was originally published on the DeckersMarketing.com blog.

Twitter has become such a phenomenon, it’s almost easier to list people who are not on Twitter.

1) My kids
2) The Amish

(I take that back, now even the Amish are on Twitter. I’m still not letting my kids on it though.)

I’ve been getting ready for a Confluence Northnetwork event this week, where I’m on a blog panel discussion on the use of Twitter for corporations.

While Twitter is becoming popular among individual users, big companies are still a little slow to jump on the Twitter bandwagon (Twandwagon?), and so may be missing an important way to communicate with its customers.

  • DirecTV is using Twitter as a way to communicate with its followers about outages, issues, and specials they’re running. They’re communicating directly with customers about billing and technical issues, and are even following other people’s discussions to see what problems people might be having.
  • Dell Computer has actually managed to make over $1 million in sales just by promoting specials and sales they were running. They promote themselves through DellSmallBiz, Direct2Dell, and Dell’s cloud computing.. Now, $1 million may not seem like a big deal to big corporations, but when’s the last time you made a million bucks letting one of your marketing interns screw around on the Internet?
  • Best Buy is almost stalkerish in their social media efforts. My friend Patric Welch – Mr. Noobie – recently posted a story on his blog about how Best Buy broke his son’s heart on Valentine’s Day. A few hours later, Jason from Best Buy responded in the comments about how he was sorry Patric had this difficulty, and to use this reference number to call us and we’ll fix it. Pretty cool, and I responded to Jason’s comment with just that sentiment. A few hours later, I received a Tweet from someone else at Best Buy talking about how they are big practitioners of social media, including Twitter.Think about it: A woman from Best Buy Tweeted me after reading my post on someone else’s blog. Eery, but cool. Mostly cool.

    That’s just a few immediate examples of how companies are using Twitter effectively. And there are dozens, if not hundreds, of small businesses, like Indianapolis-based MediaSauce, who are using the tool. MediaSauce has a private company feed that only the employees get access to. The Saucers get company updates from the feed, and can even respond if they follow with a private MediaSauce-only Twitter account.

    What about you? Do you work for a company that uses Twitter? Know one that does? Know one that should? Let me hear from you.

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      Filed Under: Lead Generation, Social Media, Social Networks, Twitter Tagged With: , , ,
      About Erik Deckers

      Erik Deckers is the VP of Creative Services for Professional Blog Service. He has been blogging since 1997, and has been a published writer for more than 24 years. He is a newspaper humor columnist, appearing in 10 papers around Indiana. Erik helped write Twitter Marketing for Dummies, and published Branding Yourself: How to use social media to invent or reinvent yourself, in December 2010 with Pearson Publishing, and will release No Bullshit Social Media: The All-Business, No-Hype Guide to Social Media Marketing in October. Erik frequently speaks about blogging and social media marketing.

      Comments

      1. Kyle Lacy says:
        November 3, 2009 at 10:18 am
        835

        I love the idea of the internal Twitter feed. The majority of the time we (Brandswag) are using our Twitter account to share client information, our information, and blog content. If you are wanting a more personal approach… join our personal Twitter accounts.
        .-= Kyle Lacy´s last blog ..Quit With All the BS. Let’s Create Business! =-.

        Reply

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