Product Marketing Blog

In Part 1 , we discussed how to know when and what are said about your company and products on Twitter. Now that you know, how do you respond? Let’s start with a story….

I recently had my Internet service go out when I was working from my home office (which I twittered about). It often seems to go out in the afternoons during the week, but usually only for 20 minutes or so. This time it was over an hour and a half, so I got fed up and called Comcast. They could see a signal going to my house, but couldn’t see the cable modem. They even tried resetting the signal, but suggested that I schedule a tech to come out the next morning to check everything out. Two minutes after I got off the phone, my service came back on. I twittered about this and suddenly received a response on twitter from comcastcares that this was normal. We had a bit of a sarcastic conversation back and forth, but the point is that Comcast almost immediately responded to my tweet (my second one, not my first):

• sarahworsham: Called Comcast – they said poor signal strength – now suddenly I’m back

• comcastcares: @sarahworsham That can happen with signal quality. If it keeps up, let us know

• sarahworsham: @comcastcares Kind of strange that it came back immediately after the phone call, don’t you think?

• comcastcares: @sarahworsham Not usually. If signal quality is weak they should have you check cables, then they reset signals

• comcastcares: @sarahworsham Sometime that corrects the problem

• sarahworsham: @comcastcares or they turn the pipe back up 🙂

• comcastcares: @sarahworsham Actually they do not control that. There is limited abilities representatives would have

• sarahworsham: @comcastcares trying to sell me phone service when my internet isn’t working wasn’t helpful tho 🙂

• comcastcares: @sarahworsham I would agree with that. First priority is resolution

• comcastcares: @sarahworsham I apologize for the trouble

Their immediate response to me seemed a bit creepy and I already had scheduled an appointment for the techs to come out. I’m not sure what else they intended other than to respond to my public tweet. Mostly it seemed like a PR ploy because they could have easily replied to me directly instead of publicly. However, I did appreciate the apology. Comcastcares is manned by Frank Eliason from Comcast Customer Outreach. Browsing his twitter feed you can see that he obviously is trying to help. The question is, does the company follow up and actually fix the problems? (Our Internet did get fixed – so far) Has their customer service improved because of this outreach?

In my opinion, monitor twitter for comments about your company or products, but take the conversation offline to protect and respect the privacy of your customers and avoid the possible PR nightmare. Follow up with great customer service and work to improve your products. Your customers will write and share the great experience they had – which is the most valuable kind of PR.

What are your thoughts on using twitter to respond to your customers?

Technorati Tags: twitter, comcast, customer service, B2B, B2C, internet consulting, B2B internet consulting, B2C internet consulting, business internet consulting

We’ve been discussing how to know what your customers are saying about you on the Web. Posting opinions or comments on a company doesn’t even require a blog, as we saw in the post about MicroBlogging with Twitter. So if your customers are tweeting (the verb of to twitter) about your company, how do you know (Part 1) and how do you respond (Part 2)?

One tool I like to use, TweetScan, allows you to search Tweets by keyword, user, and time. Once you have your keyword search, you can then subscribe to that search using RSS to keep track of what people are saying about your company and products. Or you can link to it and come back to see who else is talking about you. I suggest adding the RSS feed of the search of your company name and major products to your RSS reader and checking it with the rest of your feeds every day.

You can also take a look at the Public Timeline on Twitter to see what’s going on.

Here are some links to more tools, etc. about Twitter:

• Twitter Toolbox (Mashable)
• Five New Twitter Tools You Should Know (Online Marketing Blog)
• Five Twitter Tools We Love (GigaOm)
• 8 Cool Twitter Tools (Wired)

In Part 2, we’ll discuss how to respond to all these tweets about your product or company.

Technorati Tags: twitter, micro-blogging, tweetscan, B2B, B2C, internet consulting, B2B internet consulting, business internet consulting