Tag Archives: Twitter

How NOT To Deal With Negative Feedback On Twitter

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Image representing Twitter as depicted in Crun...
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One of the exciting and often scary aspects of Twitter and other social media networks is that your customer service interactions are completely laid bare. You can’t hide behind closed doors. Nothing is sacred.

Earlier today Jason Roe tweeted about how bad his coffee tasted.

It was a statement of opinion. It doesn’t mean that there is anything necessarily wrong with a product or a brand, but that a particular customer (Jason), had a bad experience.

No matter what you do some of your customers will not be happy. In some cases it will be your fault – you’ll screw up. In other cases it won’t be your fault.

It doesn’t matter. It will happen regardless.

So how did this exchange go down and why am I even bothering to write about it?

Have a look at the response from the coffee vendor (screenshot from Tweetdeck as the original tweet was deleted much later)

How not to deal with customer feedback

How not to deal with customer feedback

Here’s the plain text version of the exchange:

Tasted my coffee bean from badger and dodo this morning. They were over roasted! burnt to shit, crumbled when pressure applied. Smelt crap.

And their reply:

@jasonroe nasty & vindictive of you! We have a complaints & refund proceedure you can follow. 40 cafes using same coffee have no complaints!

What makes it all the more amusing (and disturbing) is that the company not only handled this particular incident badly, but also managed to lose an advocate in the process:

@BadgerAndDodo the gas thing is .. I was one of your advocates until 19:04. Well done!

The company in question have since deleted the offending tweet, but they haven’t (as of now) offered any form of apology to Jason (or anyone else)

Now, was Jason being reasonable?

Did the company completely overreact?

I’d say yes to both of those questions.

How about you?

UPDATE: Jason has posted his own version of events as well as an email that the coffee company sent him.

Twitter Usage Tip – Check Your Spelling

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When you’re setting up your Twitter profile you have the option to provide information about yourself (or your company / product / service).

If you want to be taken seriously by other users make sure that you haven’t made any basic spelling mistakes!

So, for example, if you are trying to promote yourself as an expert in “development” don’t spell it as “devleopment”.

(We all know that people will make spelling mistakes and typos when “tweeting”, but that’s a different issue entirely!)

Twitter Awards The Shorty Awards Return

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shorty-awards-logo

Shorty awards

The 3rd annual Shorty Awards have opened for nominations in the last couple of days.

In their own words:

The Shorty Awards honor the best people and organizations on Twitter and social media. Nominations may be made through Twitter and this website, culminating in an awards ceremony that recognizes the winners in dozens of official categories, as well as thousands of crowd-sourced categories. For the first time, the Shorty Awards will also honor the industry’s best agencies and social media professionals.

TSA Spoof Twitter Account

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Unless you have been avoiding the news and social networks for the last few weeks you’re probably aware of the TSA’s latest.

The TSA was setup after 9/11 to:

…strengthen the security of the nation’s transportation systems while ensuring the freedom of movement for people and commerce. Within a year, TSA assumed responsibility for security at the nation’s airports and deployed a Federal workforce to meet Congressional deadlines for screening all commercial airline passengers and baggage. In March 2003, TSA transferred from the Department of Transportation to the Department of Homeland Security.


TSA employs a risk-based strategy to secure U.S. transportation systems, working closely with stakeholders in aviation, rail, transit, highway, and pipeline sectors, as well as the partners in the law enforcement and intelligence community. The agency will continuously set the standard for excellence in transportation security through its people, processes, technologies and use of intelligence to drive operations. (source)

However, they are not exactly the most popular organisation.

In the last few weeks there has been a lot of backlash with respect to how TSA are scanning passenger’s and touching them. And no – that wasn’t a typo.

So it’s not that surprising that there’s now a spoof Twitter account that is sending out gems like this:

Travel Advisory: Playing dead does not get you out of a rub-down. Neither does actually being dead

or

The confusion at the security gate is manufactured. Confused passengers are submissive passengers

I somehow doubt the TSA are amused, but if they try to remove the account the backlash will be a LOT worse.

Be Careful Mixing Business With Pleasure

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For a lot of people a business is known for its staff.

In the case of very small companies the staff are the company.

So if you are in business and you are using Twitter / Facebook bear that in mind. If your “personal” account is going to be associated, even indirectly, with your business account just take a moment to reflect before you post.

Reflecting does not equate with modifying or changing your personality. Personality is important.

It just means that you should think a bit before you tweet. Once you’ve posted it there is no going back.

Twifficiency Shows How NOT To Use Twitter’s OAuth

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Twitter, in common with other social networking sites and services, has an authentication system. In Twitter’s case it’s called OAuth and it allows you, as a user, to give applications and service access to your account. For an application or service to function correctly it might need to gather information from your Twitter stream. Maybe it needs to see who you follow and who follows you etc., etc., etc.

All quite innocent and boring really.

However some applications are badly written – either intentionally or accidentally, and you can easily end up giving a 3rd party far too much acess to your account.

In the case of Twifficiency as soon as you login via OAuth it will send a “tweet” to all your followers saying:

My Twifficiency score is xx%. Whats yours? http://twifficiency.com/

So basically publicising itself.

Needless to say it doesn’t ask you before it does this nor does it give you any warning or indication that it’s about to do it, so it basically spams your followers

The developer, meanwhile, is denying he did this intentionally (you’d think he’d have checked .. .. )

So what can you, as a user, do?

Change your settings and avoid badly coded services like Twifficiency.

UPDATE: The “service” now has a checkbox on its main screen allowing people to opt out of the automated tweeting of their “score”

Fantasy Animals, Pets and Pretzels More Popular Than Businesses

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If you frequent the “twittersphere” or Facebook you’ll often come across businesses and their staff trying to market their products and services to you.

There’s nothing wrong with that. Of course, how they actually do it is another matter entirely …

But how successful are most of their attempts to “tap in” to “social media” and “maximise” their “potential”?

You’d have to wonder at times, especially when you look at how few “fans” or “followers” some of them actually have.

Fantasy animals, however, manage to get a reasonably respectable following..

Common Unicorn, for example, has over 1400 followers on Twitter and is listed 50 times:

Twitter's "Common" Unicorn

Twitter Unicorn

The unicorn is eclipsed by a Squirrel, however, who has managed to attract over 13.5k followers – being listed 660 times!

Twitter Squirrel

Twitter Squirrel

What about Facebook?

Facebook seems to be a great place to find oddly named “groups” for just about every possible “idea” under the sun, but a Danish pineapple has managed to get over 167k fans! Not to be outdone, Germany has a pretzel with over 379k !

And we shouldn’t forget that even cats, dogs and other pets are also finding a following on Facebook…

Why do I bring this up?

Well to start with it amused me, but also it puts things into perspective. A lot of people seem to be making a lot of money from businesses that want to “tap into” social media as part of their marketing. While there is nothing exactly “wrong” with that you’d have to wonder what kind of metrics they are using to sell their services to their clientele.

If a fruit or a pretzel can get  huge following on Facebook without it actually selling anything to anyone, how well can a “normal” business expect to do?

What is a measurement of their “success”?

The reality is that there probably isn’t a simple way to “measure” success. There are a lot of different factors that come into play.

But I digress..

Maybe the real “takeaway” from these rather silly examples is that they all share one thing in common – fun. They’re all frivolous fun. People use and interact with social media sites in their spare time, as well as during office hours. If you look at the kind of links people share, the pictures they post etc., you quickly realise that they don’t go to “social media” to buy or to be “sold to” or “marketed to”.

If you can instill some level of “fun” into your “presence” maybe you’ll find that you are actually more successful, though getting the balance right might not be that as easy for a business as it is for a fantasy animal.

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Google Buzz Boosts Buzzword Bingo Industry

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Google Inc.
Image via Wikipedia

Social Media gurus rejoiced this week with the launch of Google’s latest service – Google Buzz

Expect to see plenty of “tempting” offers in the next few weeks from “experts” on how to “maximise” your “potential” using the latest Google service.

Google Wave was meant to revolutionise the web, so Google Buzz will, of course, flatten Twitter and takeover Facebook….

Or will it?

Does anyone really care?