An Amateur’s View on Social Media – Part 2: Transparency on a Business Level
As stated in my previous post, I do not claim to be a Social Media expert of any sort.
But when it comes to companies, brands, etc. having a presence in the Social Space, I feel they need to have the same, if not more, of a level of transparency.
I’ll use Twitter as an example since its my new favorite and the most relevant for this post…
I think one way to gauge how well a company uses Twitter is to simply look at the amount of Tweets that are @replys. This shows that they are actually reading and responding to mentions of their brand.
I recently read in a post (http://bit.ly/9Peuq) by Chris Pirillo (@chrispirillo) that he heard Best Buy is requiring new hires to not only be on Twitter, but to also have at least 250 followers. So naturally, I’m going to call out Best Buy on this.
I happen to love Best Buy. In fact, I just bought a 42″ HDTV there yesterday. But when it comes to running a Twitter page, they are clueless.
If you look at their Twitter page (@BestBuy), it says it all. All of their tweets are plugging their website, products, or even worse yet, the Twitter pages of other Best Buy employees. We know what your website is. It’s listed on your page in case we didn’t know it was bestbuy.com. We know what you sell, and we definitely don’t care what your employees are up to at the moment.
In the past, I have asked Best Buy simple questions via Twitter and received no answer. Whats the point of having a Twitter page if you’re not going to interact with your customers?
So that was a look at a poor approach. I’ll also give the opposite end of the spectrum.
I couldn’t decide on who was best out of those who I follow, so I’ll point out all three…@DunkinDonuts, @Starbucks, and @RizzoTees.
If you go to their pages, they are actually interacting with their followers. Imagine that! Sure they get their plugs in about their brand, but they answer questions and have fun with their followers. Here the word comes again…they are transparent!
As of the time I’m writing this, @Starbucks has 250,043 followers, @RizzoTees has 36,497, @DunkinDonuts has 28,662, and @BestBuy has 4,934.
Coincidence? I don’t think so…
July 17, 2009 at 3:43 pm
I’m not above shameless, blatant marketing of my tees. But interaction with the Tweeps is key. In fact, it’s fun – that’s good enough reason to jump in and talk with your followers, with your customers (the happy ones and the complaining ones.)
@DirecTV is doing a great job with their Twitter account – the people that manage their account get ON TOP of customer issues, in a way that the entire rest of the company doesn’t! I went through a horrible experience that the the Twitter DirecTV employees just fixed without question. Awesome use of Social Media.
Last night I had a discussion with an intern that is working at a famous national service company (you’d have heard of them). They have two separate accounts on Twitter. In one account, they are not allowed to follow anyone back – corporate policy. In the other account, they are not allowed to interact with their followers. Corporate has the screws really tightened on these two accounts. And alas, they’re not as good or as useful as they could be.