MindComet

Three improvements to your company’s Twitter strategy

1. Stop using Twitter strictly as a broadcast medium

People are on Twitter to listen to others and to have others listen to them. Stop using Twitter as a way to broadcast out your marketing message and start having real conversations with your followers. No one wants a constant barrage of your marketing messages. Listen to what they have to say and provide authentic responses. You’ll build trust, loyalty and respect with your followers.

2. Share some knowledge with your followers

You don’t have to be a college or university to do this. Educate people about your products and services. Don’t go overboard though. Mix in selfless education about your industry, or hometown, or whatever. People grow tired of incessant self-promotion.

3. Have fun with your followers

Make Twitter into an interactive tool for engaging your followers in fun ways. Send out trivia questions, quotes and fun facts that are relevant to your industry. If people respond to your engagement, acknowledge their response. Try mixing a contest into your engagement. Offer a nominal gift for the first person that responds.

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Posted by Jeremy Hilton on Mar. 20, 2009

Twitter support, your problems are far and wide

I recently posted about the lack of response from Twitter Support. I am unhappy to say that my issue has not been resolved yet. And as I’ve gone deeper and deeper down the Twitter support hole, I’ve learned just how broken the support department at Twitter actually is.

Most everyone is aware of the Twitter hack that happened earlier this month.  My understanding is that it was due to security flaws in their support queue. Happily they fixed the issue by replacing their support queue with a new system called Zendesk ( they blog about this change at Twitter Blog: The Zen of Twitter Support ) and more recently rolled out Get Satisfaction for support as well.

I applaud the team for making changes in response to a problem, but, in my opinion, they really made a mess of things. Let me explain how.

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Posted by Jeremy Hilton on Jan. 30, 2009

Twitter support, can I get some $&%*#@& help?

Question: If I use a free service, which offers support to it’s users, what can I reasonably expect in terms of customer care? Am I entitled to the same levels of care as a customer of a “pay” service?

Case in point, Twitter. A well-known free service, which offers a support queue. A queue in which I’ve had two tickets for some time now. The first is dated 11/14/08. The second (which really is the same issue, just resubmitted) is dated 12/04/08. Neither ticket has been responded to by their support department. This lack of response is extremely irritating.

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Posted by Jeremy Hilton on Dec. 16, 2008

Social Media wins the battle!

Victory! Social media wins!

If you aren’t familiar with my plight, please refer back to My Land Rover Battle

So a few days ago, my wife received a call from Mr Fields directly. She explained the situation, noting the poor customer service we suffered through. From what she tells me, Mr Fields was not too happy with his staff. In fact, he couldn’t believe some of the things that we were told.

Thankfully his disgust translated into action. He told us to bring our car back and that his staff would diagnose the problem at no charge. We did just that this morning.

Good news, the issue apparently was very minor and Land Rover fixed on the spot at no charge.

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Posted by Jeremy Hilton on Oct. 20, 2008

My Land Rover Battle

Twitter friends! Please help me to demonstrate the power of social media in my fight against Land Rover and Fields BMW. This could be a really cool social media experiment!

Here is the background on my battle.

My wife and I dropped our 2002 Freelander off to diagnose a “check engine” light warning. When we picked up the car, my wife noticed the following new issues.

* The locks on all the doors no longer work
* The back window won’t go down
* The built-in security system no longer functions.

When we informed Land Rover about this situation, they had the following response

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Posted by Jeremy Hilton on Oct. 02, 2008