If you sell any sort of product or service these days and you are not actively monitoring the Internets (invented by Al Gore) for mentions of your product then you are going to go the way of the Dodo bird or at least not do as well as you could be doing. There is no excuse not to do this as it is so easy to setup Google alerts and other monitoring vehicles to keep tabs on what is being said about you on social media.
Here are a couple of recent examples for me.
First, last night I noticed my T-Mobile phone didn’t have service. Then I noticed that all four T-Mobile phones in our household didn’t have service. Rather than search on Google I went to Twitter and did a search to see if anyone was talking about a T-Mobile outage on Twitter. And boy were they ever:
On Wednesday, #T-Mobile was again a trending topic on Twitter, where customers expressed their frustration. “I talked to T-Mobile reps more than I did to anyone else,” joeldreamweaver said. “They overcharged me. I’ll never do business with them again.”
Wouldn’t surprise me if the person at T-Mobile monitoring the Internets for mentions of T-Mobile was notified of the outage before their engineers were.
Now given the size and scope of T-Mobile there isn’t much someone monitoring Twitter could have done here – pretty hard to respond to tens of thousands of Tweets – but it does go to show how quickly people will share their thoughts about your service, usually when there is a problem.
Another example is my recent review of Quicken 2010 – the same day I wrote the post I got a comment from Chelsea at Quicken who clearly has as part of her job to engage with bloggers who write about Quicken. Search Google for “Chelsea at Quicken” to see her at work.
Here was her comment to me:
Thanks for sharing your observations about Quicken 2010. I’m glad you’ve decided to stick with us after 16 years of commitment -that’s fabulous. If you’re still having any trouble, feel free to reach out – I am happy to get you some help so you can get going on our much easier-to-use Quicken 2010.
A very simple “welcome to the neighborhood” kind of a message – but welcoming nonetheless.
My final example is from my iPodMeister review. Now when I wrote my positive review nobody from the company stopped by but I did have a customer write about his disatisfaction in a couple of comments on that entry:
Attention: iPodMeister is easy to fool you when it comes to claiming your prize. “its to good to be true”. they claim some of my cds were damaged and covers missing and damaged cds do to shipping.. they irritate me when it come to communicating to them, i rather throw away the remainder of my cds then give them anything else.
Kris from iPodMeister left a comment in rebutal, less than a week later (why not same day Kris – come on!):
Kevin,
there is no reason why you should be angry. We stated clearly on our website (http://www.ipodmeister.com/eligiblecds.htm) and in the detailed e-mail you received that we do NOT accept CDs with incomplete cover art or radio edits, promos, or singles. We also stated clearly that we do NOT accept CDs that are severly scratched or boxsets that are incomplete. You sent over 100 (!) items that fell into these categories. Why are you surprised that we did accept CDs that were clearly described as unacceptable. Common sense tells you that these CDs couldn’t have any value for anybody. We don’t “fool” anybody. We made clear -both on our website and in the detailed e-mail sent to you- that damaged, incomplete, worthless CDs are … well, wortless and that we don’t accept them. Sorry, but there is absolutely no basis for your complaint.
Now the interesting thing in this case is that while I do side with Kris having been a happy customer, I do think you can get yourself into trouble by having such an argument with a customer out in public. So I am a little torn on this example – perhaps a better approach would be for Kris to ask me for the private contact information for the commenter so I could put the two together privately? Or maybe right out there in public is fine if you know you are right, I’m not sure. I do know that iPodMeister got a few more mentions and backlinks, and that isn’t a bad thing for them.
In any case, I thought these were interesting recent examples of the relationship between product and service companies and the Internets/Social media.
I suspect companies will respond quicker and quicker to what gets written about them. And I think that’s a good thing for everyone.
UPDATE: Interesting article on Social Media Monitoring that I found by looking at my referrer logs – somebody at Intuit uses SM2 for this very thing.
Related posts:
iPodMeister Review If you have read my posts on How To Sell Used Books on Amazon you know that I went from...
Watch the Internets – Listen to Your Customers
by john on November 4, 2009
If you sell any sort of product or service these days and you are not actively monitoring the Internets (invented by Al Gore) for mentions of your product then you are going to go the way of the Dodo bird or at least not do as well as you could be doing. There is no excuse not to do this as it is so easy to setup Google alerts and other monitoring vehicles to keep tabs on what is being said about you on social media.
Here are a couple of recent examples for me.
First, last night I noticed my T-Mobile phone didn’t have service. Then I noticed that all four T-Mobile phones in our household didn’t have service. Rather than search on Google I went to Twitter and did a search to see if anyone was talking about a T-Mobile outage on Twitter. And boy were they ever:
Wouldn’t surprise me if the person at T-Mobile monitoring the Internets for mentions of T-Mobile was notified of the outage before their engineers were.
Now given the size and scope of T-Mobile there isn’t much someone monitoring Twitter could have done here – pretty hard to respond to tens of thousands of Tweets – but it does go to show how quickly people will share their thoughts about your service, usually when there is a problem.
Another example is my recent review of Quicken 2010 – the same day I wrote the post I got a comment from Chelsea at Quicken who clearly has as part of her job to engage with bloggers who write about Quicken. Search Google for “Chelsea at Quicken” to see her at work.
Here was her comment to me:
A very simple “welcome to the neighborhood” kind of a message – but welcoming nonetheless.
My final example is from my iPodMeister review. Now when I wrote my positive review nobody from the company stopped by but I did have a customer write about his disatisfaction in a couple of comments on that entry:
Kris from iPodMeister left a comment in rebutal, less than a week later (why not same day Kris – come on!):
Now the interesting thing in this case is that while I do side with Kris having been a happy customer, I do think you can get yourself into trouble by having such an argument with a customer out in public. So I am a little torn on this example – perhaps a better approach would be for Kris to ask me for the private contact information for the commenter so I could put the two together privately? Or maybe right out there in public is fine if you know you are right, I’m not sure. I do know that iPodMeister got a few more mentions and backlinks, and that isn’t a bad thing for them.
In any case, I thought these were interesting recent examples of the relationship between product and service companies and the Internets/Social media.
I suspect companies will respond quicker and quicker to what gets written about them. And I think that’s a good thing for everyone.
UPDATE: Interesting article on Social Media Monitoring that I found by looking at my referrer logs – somebody at Intuit uses SM2 for this very thing.
Related posts:
Technorati Tags: companies, customer service, internet, internet mentions, social media