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So you guys are all tied for first as the smartest person I know. I have a question for you about Twitter used in business settings. We received a really nice post from a user who had been dealing with some technical issues. Over a few days, he worked with a couple of our engineers, who you may know as they are both Green Guys, and was able to resolve his issue. It’s a great little moment for us because it validates some of the work we are doing to provide different options for our users to work with engineering. I don’t know if this user has a support contract or not but he was able to engage with support and get his issue resolved.

So my questions is this: are you using Twitter for any kind of meaningful engagement with any company you do business with? Doesn’t have to be IT related or even in your professional life…it could be a good experience dealing with a shoe company (I actually had a fantastic experience with New Balance that started & ended on Twitter and made me a customer of theirs for life).

I’m curious to know who out there is really doing it right with their customers and finding new or different ways to engage.

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I can understand its potential usefulness in situations such as this, but I have not had a need for it yet and don’t foresee that changing any time soon.

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Are you using Twitter as a support tool or just using it for warm fuzzies? If you are using it as a support tool I would think it would be pretty useless as there are better tools for offering support to end users. If I were the owner of a company I would have NO social media presence.

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Twitter I think does have a place in certain companies.

For me I do not like it and do not want to use it.

For my employer we do not allow it even though we have had a manager that wanted to use it. We provided documentation on what would need to be done and the possible issues we may run into and Senior Administration said no. I work for a medical facility and do not really see a need for us to use it but the risks are pretty big if someone tweets something they are not supposed to. Not worth the headache.

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Thanks everyone. We are using Twitter several different ways to communicate with our users. It is definitely a complement to support. We also use it to keep useful technical information in play with things like how-to docs, best practices, updates on hotfixes & betas. We also watch it closely to make sure we answer customers when they have questions or gripes. It is a piece of a larger communications plan that includes platforms like Spiceworks, Reddit, Google+. We don’t want to be invasive, but we want to be where are users are so we can help them as they need it.

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That’s our strategy as well. I feel it’s just another way for customers to engage with us.

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Matt and Meghan nailed it on the head. The long and short of it is be where your users are (and, to an extent, where you anticipate them being in the future). As Meghan said, it’s another channel for engagement.

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I’ve actually had good interactions with my old cable company. It was easier to tweet them than to call in, because wait times were long. They were always responsive, especially when I had what was basically a general question. If things were easier to find on their site, I wouldn’t even have to do that. :wink:

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As a customer, that is a great way to pursue resolution while maximizing limited time. Am getting good results with Dell Support with phone, email, and chat options. Can choose the option which fits the severity, my patience level, and response time needed.

Complication for SMB is smaller pool of employees and need to focus resources. We’re bigger than some, but still feeling out the various social media options. Constraint is management is older, and has a higher tendency to be uninvolved in social media.

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When I worked at aol they relied on twitter and facebook heavily for support on dealing with compromised accounts and password resets for mail. At google though they didn’t really use it for support. More like blanketed responses.

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