Published by Janine on 10 Aug 2009 at 05:13 pm
Can Tweeting help get your own way?
When I read this article http://edition.cnn.com/2009/TRAVEL/traveltips/08/06/travel.social.media/index.html from cnn.com I was thinking about how popular Twitter and Facebook are, how they have developed over the years and how we all use them to micro-blog about what is happening around us.
Micro-blogging certainly gets whatever you write about passed around the world, depending of course what, where, when and how you write it. Current affairs, news stories, etc etc are tweeted about constantly, with Twitter setting up a real-time search for most popular talked about categories. A great example is when the plane crash landed in the Hudson River in New York. The news of this accident spread around the world faster than any news network could report about it live on air.
The power of Twitter is unbelievable.
So when a Los Angeles blogger (Jessica Gottlieb) watched helplessly while her kids were on-board a plane waiting to depart for their destination, she got out her phone and tweeted; “Dear Virgin Air, My children have been on the tarmac for one hour with 90 more minutes to wait. I am at JFK gate b25. Pls RT.” (Which her followers did.)
Ms Gottlieb got a response from Virgin America with the plane taking off 20 minutes after her phone conversation with them. So, can you get your own way by tweeting or using status updates to get what you want?
I think it depends on your audience, who you tweet to, how well your tweets are written and how you come across (are your tweets interesting?) as well as what you tweet about.
The fact that this tweet helped improve customer expectations in this instance doesn’t mean that it will necessarily be the same for other people in this situation, or does it? What are your thoughts on this? Have you experienced something similar with businesses meeting or exceeding expectations when they were dashed to begin with?
What does this mean for marketers of the companies who dash hopes and then exceed expectations? Is it truly possible for this to happen at all? As I have a retail background I have very high expectations of customer service, therefore maybe I would expect more?!
What do you think as a marketer? Is this positive or negative marketing for Virgin Air (America)?
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Volker on 10 Aug 2009 at 5:58 pm #
Hello,
Nice article.
I agree, whether your tweet achieves anything depends on how many people you reach with it, what you tweet about and who re-tweets it.
Example: If you tweet about a brand, any brand should be concerned, no matter whether you have 1 or 1,000,000 followers. Because if you have only a few followers and they re-tweet and re-tweet….you get your word out to potentially more than 1,000,000. So for brands it is so essential to monitor any twitter activity (or any social media activity).
Then there is “what do you tweet about”. Jam just recently was arguing about “Twitter Litter” but I believe you can tweet what you want as long as you can live with the consequences. People have lost their jobs because of social media (silly them tweeting about their jobs and how much they dislike their boss) and people have tweeted about offers they want to sell. The latter just loose their followers and will be blocked by other users, they eliminate themselves automatically.
Whatever you do, say what you have to say. The more interesting (and keyword rich) the better for you, as you get more followers and more influence (or direct influence to come back to the example about the brands).
Bottom line – use it wisely, often and make sense!
The power of Twitter is unbelievable | SEO PR TIPS on 09 Feb 2010 at 3:24 pm #
[...] this blog in August 2009, I wrote about how tweeting can get your own way and how the power of Twitter is unbelievable, which is very true and I think people forget this all [...]