A recent study from Maritz Research / Evolve24 found that 70% of companies ignore customer complaints on Twitter. Many are citing this as evidence that these companies “just don’t get it,” but I’d rather see it as a huge opportunity for those companies who are not participating. Anyone looking for ROI (Return On Investment)) in social media could view failure to monitor and respond to sentiment on Twitter as a case of LON (Loss On Noninvestment).

In my book I wrote about U-Haul, the truck rental company, and how they ignored discontent among Twitter users and ended up driving customers to competing rental companies resulting in a loss of revenue.

David Alston, a Twitter user, and someone familiar with the power of social media, complained online about an experience he had with the company. Others joined in, most of them echoing David’s sentiment that U-Haul had provided poor customer service. This was more than just a rant session. This was a deliberate grassroots effort to get the company’s attention by complaining in a public forum. Here are a few of the comments about U-Haul:

• “Horrendous service…fails on many levels…poorly maintained trucks, too.”
• “I’m going to need a moving truck soon…maybe I should try another company this time around”
• “Abysmal customer service”
• “I have had way too many problems with them — bad equipment, oversold equipment, and so on.”

A company with even the most superficial presence on Twitter could have managed this situation, but U-Haul was completely absent. So where were the company’s representatives and spokespeople while all this was going on? Wherever they might have been, they were completely ignorant of this groundswell of consumer discontent. And once apprised of it (from multiple sources), they simply chose to ignore it.

I wrote a communications plan for U-Haul, which I called “My Almost Free Twitter-Based Corporate Social Media Strategy” with the intent of giving it to them. Of course when I went to their web site there were no email addresses, so I pasted the plan into a contact form and sent it. I never heard a word, not even a form email “Thanks for contacting U-Haul.” I was also not surprised.

The question is, ultimately, why wouldn’t you listen and respond to customer sentiment on Twitter? It’s not that difficult and not that expensive. And these discussions can be extremely valuable to a company that knows what to do with them. First of all, they serve as a rich source of general customer satisfaction data. Although it is mostly anecdotal, it can be quite useful and enlightening. Oftentimes, you’ll find company boosters—people who evangelize the company.

Today, U-Haul has several Twitter accounts:Corporate @uhaul
Customer Service @uhaul_cares
Trailer Hitches @TrailerHitches

They seem to be doing a pretty good job, based on the tweets I read.

By “listening” to online conversations, a company can become aware of a particularly acute customer satisfaction issue, like the one U-Haul faced.

It would be naive to say a company “has” to participate in any form of social media. But with Twitter’s low cost of entry, why not exploit the opportunity to get involved in and learn from some of these discussions? The Maritz - Evolve24 study found that people like being contacted in response to a tweet:

Tags: twitter, sentiment, customer complaints, company, companies, monitoring, responding, brand, Maritz Research, Evolve24

Recently a couple of people told me they were thinking about unfollowing all of their social network friends and starting over. I’m not sure I understand the thinking behind this. Sometimes it’s done as a “grand gesture” to convey to the world that the quality of social network relationships matters more than the quantity. Sometimes it’s done to simplify one’s online life and eliminate the noise of too many followers. And sometimes it’s done merely to attract attention to one’s self, making it an ironic gesture. (”Having a lot of people follow my Twitter updates isn’t important, so I will do something that attracts a lot of attention, thereby driving more people to be interested in me, to prove that I don’t care how many people are interested in me.”)

Many Twitter users with a large number of followers (and similarly, Facebook users with a large number of friends) have either unfollowed in equally large numbers, or considered it.

One of the first people I recall doing this was Loic LeMeur, CEO of Seesmic. Jason Calacanis also did it. According to the tech news blog, they both unfollowed everyone but “kept” all their followers. I am not sure what that means, since you don’t directly choose or control who follows you. I suppose if you were really serious about recouping your privacy you could block all your unwanted followers, but that’s really inconsiderate and pointless as well.

Shockingly, I have been unfollowed and rarely do I give a rat’s ass. Loic was following me (and vice versa) when he unfollowed everyone. I don’t think I was following Jason Calacanis.

I will say there are a couple people who have unfollowed me on Twitter but have kept me as a friend on Facebook and even added me elsewhere, which is momentarily puzzling but does not affect my self worth.

Mass unfollowing as a gesture is like suicide. If you’re contemplating it just because you want to impress a bunch of people, don’t bother. No one will notice. (Even Loic and Jason had to announce to the world they were doing a mass unfollowing to insure they were noticed.)

Here’s why. Let’s say you unfollow 5000 people on Twitter. It’s not like there are 5000 people in an auditorium who came only to hear you, who are now gasping in amazement and stunned by your maneuver. That 5000 is made up of individuals, many of whom will be oblivious to the fact you unfollowed them and some of whom will be pleased. There is no 5000-person impact. CNN will not report it.

If on the other hand you feel the quality of your social network relationships has deteriorated, then maybe you do want to unfollow a bunch of people. Just keep it to yourself. Anyone who boasts they are going to ignore a bunch of people, essentially snubbing them, doesn’t have very good manners.

Tags: twitter, facebook, follow, unfollow, followers, mass

When I first joined Twitter, I could not imagine what it would be like to have 10,000 followers, or as I prefer to describe it, to have 10,000 people subscribe to my updates. (Jesus had followers. Twitter users have subscribers. It’s not the same thing.)

I got there honestly, and therefore, a lot more slowly than people who were better at amassing followers for the sake of numeric bragging rights. I never participated in any schemes to add followers, and in fact, did not participate in “Follow Friday” and came out strongly against what I saw as a pyramid scheme. When I was within a few hundred of 10,000, I offered a copy of my SocialCorp book to my 10,000th subscriber and a copy to a randomly selected person who tweeted about it, but by then I was certain to reach 10K any way. If you do the math on the cost of a couple of books, my 10,000th subscriber was really expensive.

When I signed up in June, 2007, Twitter, launched publicly in July, 2006, was less than a year old. Everyone was an early adopter. The conversations were engaging and stimulating. This has changed, and it’s partly my fault for following people whose tweets do not interest me, or in some cases, offend me.

It’s time to review my criteria for following/following back people on Twitter. Way back when (sounding like a wagon master on the Oregon Trail), I actively sought people in two distinct categories — friends and present/former colleagues, and people in allied fields, like public relations, social media, corporate communications, writing and publishing. As I spent time on Twitter, observing early adopters and the triumphs and missteps of the first businesses using Twitter as a communications tool, I became very well informed in these areas, and was often quite amused. As new users joined Twitter, many of them gravitated to me and the other one million or so people who were already there. So much of the early communications on Twitter involved discussions like “What is Twitter?” “Is it for real?” “How does a business use Twitter?” “What a waste of time!” and “What’s the etiquette here?”

Somewhere along the line, that all changed, and now about 25 percent of my new followers are multi-level marketers (MLMers), spammers, people actively trying to sell me goods and services, pornographers, and “make $3000 a minute while you sleep” hucksters. At the same time, Twitter grew from well under a million users to around 20 million today.

My original followers policy was to follow people in the categories I’ve described who interested me, people who came to my attention through an interesting article or presentation; and people I met at conferences and on panel discussions. I also looked for people who lived in my area, rural Santa Cruz County. I would follow back any new follower who appeared to be a “real” person and not a spam or porn account, or some kind of bot.

My online conversational style is to engage with anyone interesting. I don’t segregate by political affiliation, religion, profession, gender, etc. While this is an inclusive policy, it has led to too much noise in my Twitter experience. My inclusive policies regarding political discussion, for example, which once allowed me to see many sides to a political issue, have now subjected me to fringe discussions which are often hateful and offensive.

And I know I’ll get a bunch of grief for revealing this, but I don’t really care for pets. And I don’t have any. But I have early Twitter friends who have pets. (This is like saying I know people who wear shoes.) Others who have come along have observed that I have pet lovers as followers and have assumed I am one, too. But I am not. So people who sell/market to pet owners target me, and they couldn’t be further off their demographic.

I forged some great friendships during those early times, and had my brushes with celebrity, like many Twitter users have. It was great watching Comcast, Dell, Ford, and others as they joined Twitter and began to use it seriously. Recently, for example,  I noticed someone tweeting about their enthusiasm for Kentucky Fried Chicken. I replied that they should follow @kfc_colonel, the official Twitter account for KFC. @kfc_colonel replied to me “Joel, you’re the Colonel’s guy. You were there when we had more herbs & spices than we had followers. Thanks!” It’s nice to have a personal connection with a company. I’ve had the chance on Twitter to “talk” to Tony Hsieh of Zappos, MC Hammer, and Curt Smith of Tears for Fears. Alyssa Milano even sent me a direct message! (I sleep with it under my pillow.)

So Twitter is what I make of it. And it’s sort of cool to have 10,000 subscribers, but the number of followers I have is not as important as who they are and how I interact with them. And that’s up to me. Anyone who says “Twitter sucks, there are too many spammers,” or “Ashton Kutcher ruined Twitter,” can easily take back control of their Twitter existence. That’s what I’m trying to do.

I recently posted my Brief List of 53 Twitter Rules, guidelines for how I choose to use Twitter. I got a great response, and one person commented they liked Twitter “because there weren’t rules.” There are all kinds of rules, formal and informal, from a multitude of sources, that we follow every day, often without thinking about them. Some of these are legislated, and some of them simply come from community values.

Twitter, like all social networks, has a Terms of Service (TOS) that reflects the company’s intent of creating a safe environment in which people can communicate without harm to themselves or others; protections to shield the company from lawsuits and other legal liability; and the desire of the company to preserve its intellectual property and ability to make money. In addition to the TOS, there are also The Twitter Rules.

When I wrote my earlier post on this, I was clear that I was writing my rules, adding “I wouldn’t presume to tell you how to use Twitter.” My rules are based on a combination of factors, like why I am on Twitter, my personal standard of ethics, my perception of community values, and Twitter’s TOS.

Rules have numerous origins. If you believe human life is sacred, you probably agree that murder should be illegal. There are both moral and legal proscriptions against murder. Other rules are strictly legislative, like the imposition of fines for overtime parking. Most drivers would agree that parking for more than one hour in a one-hour zone is not immoral, but there are still penalties for doing so.

And finally, some rules, which we informally agree to follow, are either self-imposed or imposed by society. For example, if I told you there were rules concerning conduct during a business meeting, you might take the libertarian or anarchist view, “Hey, no one makes rules for me!” So if I suggested you shouldn’t show up for a meeting drunk and unshowered, would I be imposing arbitrary rules on you? It’s not illegal to do so. It’s not even immoral. But there are penalties.

Twitter, and every other social network, has written/legislated rules, moral/ethical rules, and some rules that are derived from community values. You don’t have to follow these rules, but if you don’t have an understanding of community values on Twitter, and the basic standards of conduct people expect, you will have a lonely existence and could find your account suspended.

Here are three of my rules, from my previous post, and an explanation of where they came from:

• Don’t tweet anything more than four times. I came up with this rule for myself before Twitter banned recurring tweets. I tweet a link to a new blog post a maximum of four times, at different times each day, over the course of three to four days, to make sure I reach the most people. As the Twitter Rules state, you are spamming “If you post duplicate content over multiple accounts or multiple duplicate updates on one account.” This is an example of a rule that was based on community values and became a legislated rule. If you break it, you are considered a spammer and could have your account suspended, or at the very least, annoy your followers.
• Put enough info in a tweet so that it can stand on its own. No one can see your ongoing “conversation,” so a tweet that simply says “I hear ya” is of no value. This rule is suggested for those using Twitter for business or professional reasons. If you use Twitter as a kind of AIM/MySpace 2.0, and tweet with a few friends informally, who’s to say there’s anything wrong with a tweet that doesn’t stand by itself?
• Delete lame tweets. Clean up your timeline. This is an example of a rule that most people probably don’t follow. Social media purists might object to this practice. But I don’t.

For many, social networking is a leisure activity that takes place outside of school or the workplace. After a day of following someone else’s rules, it’s liberating to sign on to Twitter, Facebook, or MySpace and engage in a little free expression. But one of the things that has made social networking so popular is that it is so social, that it partially replicates the social interactions we have in the physical world, and therefore requires similar structure and self control. Or you could be a sociopath.

Tags: The Twitter Rules, Community Values, TOS, Terms of Service

I discovered last night that Twitter is not simply blocking recurring tweets as reported elsewhere, they’ve actually implemented filters that physically block recurring tweets.

I was using Tweetie, an iPhone Twitter client. I copied and pasted a previous tweet and tapped “Send.” The tweet did not appear on my timeline, so I tried it again directly from Twitter and again it didn’t show up. I guessed that Twitter was filtering tweets, so I rearranged a few words, and reposted it successfully.

In case you’re wondering why I would republish the same tweet, I generally promote new blog posts three to four times over the course of a few days, hoping to catch different people each time. There are other times when people (other than spammers) might want to publish the same tweet multiple times.

I’ve always advocated for better spam protection on Twitter, and I’m pleased that the company is doing something about it, although I have mixed feelings about filtering tweets on-the-fly.

Tags: recurring, tweets, Twitter, TOS, spam