I’ve been thinking about twitter this week. I wasn’t fully offline the past few days, but I had a nice short vacation so I wasn’t keeping up with my rss feeds and twitter usage. Taking a break from that stuff is nice periodically for many reasons, but I like coming back to a full rss reader because it lets me figure out which feeds I don’t really need to be subscribed to and which ones had more important (to me) blog posts. Now I can do some end-of-the-year rss cleanup and unsubscribe from some things.
Twitter’s been the same- when I’m not commuting, I really don’t care as much about the SF Bus/Transit Alerts and all that. When I’m not up in early in the morning I don’t care as much about the NYSE/Nasdaq hot sectors & market trends. But with twitter it’s not that big a deal to let those go by. There’s not an “inbox” to clean out.
But I was thinking about how businesses tweet a lot recently. (Side note: The Bivings Group just posted their study of Twitter Usage by America’s Newspapers – go read it).
I’ve been hung up on whether or not the quality of a business tweet biases me away from or endears(?) me more towards being a fan of the business.
As with the newspapers most businesses are one-way tweeters (see study link above). That’s fine with me. I expect that to happen most of the time, but I am pleasantly surprised when businesses respond to communication.
The best examples of this for me this year seemed to be from wineries. I had some pleasant exchanges from some wine makers and wineries based off my tweets from CellarTracker. I didn’t expect to get followed, let alone tweeted to or emailed about things but it happened and it was fun.
Most of the time I expect things to be outbound communication. For example – restaurants tweeting about today’s menu, or reservation cancellations and table availability, or event events like some of the ones that Batter Blaster had (they also sponsored SXSW or ACL and had interesting contests going on).
I also expect what I consider “marketing updates” – things like mentions in the press about said company. Boom! Studios is good about this (disclosure, I know those guys)- they’re always providing links to reviews, event coverage, new release schedules, events, etc.
That said- what’s bugged the crap out of me lately points out how snotty I am. Allow me to pick on one business to point this out- they have the cleanest bad examples.
There’s a small restaurant walk up window that’s pretty popular in part of SF. The WSJ even had a brief mention of them. [side note: I've been there a few times now and have tried a lot of their menu and have been greatly disappointed with most of the items (not to mention the surly service). I think the old "location, location, location" adage really helps in their case.]
In this restaurant’s case, the one way tweets from them seem to be really annoying.
They do their typical good update occasionally like this one from this morning about today’s menu:
“SOUP,THERE IT IS!! Black Bean Soup with Avocado,Crema,and Pickled Onions”.
Simple enough, shows their sense of humor too and it gets the job done.
Surprisingly though- if they run out of said soup/special, there’s no follow-up tweet to let their followers know that.
But there’s no separation from the owner’s personal life and mannerisms and the business. I know that is part of their charm, but for me if there are negatives, it makes me question the business as well, or at least be biased in a negative way.
One of the things I hate is when people use phrases which include “hella”, “holla”, “shorties” in a serious way. That’s part of my internal bias. When I read stuff like that I almost instantly cringe. That restaurant uses phrases like that so it automatically puts me on edge. I know I shouldn’t but I still do.
But when I then see tweets from the restaurant like ‘[realname] you dropped your credit card‘ (link) I’m pretty sure this restaurant may have more fundamental business problems.
If you have time to whip out your phone, load a twitter client, and tweet that about a customer then you have time to google the customer’s name and contact him or her directly. Or maybe even use what they refer to as a “phone book” and do it.
I don’t know if I’d trust that restaurant again with my credit card information if they couldn’t simply contact me directly.
I actually emailed that guy after taking all of 30 seconds from my life to google that particular customer. 1st link shown was a linkedin.com profile listing his employer (I didn’t need to log in to linkedin, I just read the result). I then found the employer’s site. It had a map on it which showed they were around the corner from that restaurant. I even went so far as to look to see if there was a “our team” link. There was and I emailed the customer directly about his credit card. He was pretty thankful.
What would have stopped me from just walking over there and asking for that credit card and saying I also lost my id? I bet they would have handed it over. It was after their lunch rush after all -despite them saying they were busy fryin’ chicken. They should have called the guy.
This has turned into a messy rant. But my point is that there are a lot of businesses trying to leverage twitter and blogs into their work flow. If they have sound practices in the real world, I think they’ll really be able to supplement things (supplement as add, not substitute). Others who aren’t as sound will just be loud one-way shouters and will eventually disappear- just not as quickly before.
Hey shorties- wat du U think abot biz & twitter? Holla back in the comments!!1
