I had forgotten about quite a nice tweet exchange from a couple of weeks ago until I saw @Jasonhall tweet a link to this story about someone tweeting about a problem with their mobile phone provider.
A couple of weeks ago Mrs R and I went to London for a wedding. We booked in to The May Fair Hotel, who I now know are also on Twitter as @TheMayFairHotel. As ever and much to my wifes consternation I tweeted and checked in using Gowalla and thought no more of it.
After a night out in the big city I checked in on Twitter to see that The May Fair Hotel had seen my tweet and taken the time to respond.
Now as far as I am aware The May Fair Hotel were not following me and were unlikely to know I am a Twitter user, so they are actively searching Twitter for references to their hotel and responding to them. My experience at the hotel was positive so it is quite an easy thing to do but I would imagine given the level of customer care in the hotel generally that they would deal with negative tweets as well, or certainly use them as a conduit for making contact with an unhappy customer and dealing with the issues off-line.
It is hard to imagine that anyone would tweet anything particularly negative about this hotel,
1, it is a very good hotel and nothing was too much trouble.
2, if a guest did have a problem I’m sure they would address it directly with the staff before tweeting something.
A simple lesson is to be learnt from this, if you are going to use twitter in your business for marketing or whatever, make sure you run searches for your brand & keywords. Not all your customers will be following you or even know you exist on Twitter and unless you look for them and what they are saying you can’t hear them..
Great tip here Mike and nice to some another company doing social media the right way.
Twitter clients/software like Tweetdeck & Hootsuite make it even easier for companies to search/track discussion about them on Twitter as you can create and save custom searches (as long as they’re not over 140 characters long).
I use lots of searches for the various websites, artists, clients areas I represent and it’s amazing what you can find very easily. It also pays to search for abbreviations, misspellings and any terms people might use to refer to your company/product – not everyone will type your name correctly!
James(Quote) (Reply)
That is my next post, different Twitter clients and searches. How not to get it wrong..
Michael Rawlins(Quote) (Reply)
I tweeted about a problem I had with BT a few months ago. They got back to me immediately and sorted it out.
I also made a positive tweet last weekend about my new Clarks shoes and Clarks tweeted me back, which I wasn’t expecting.
Andrew Woodvine(Quote) (Reply)