Tom Hapgood

Social Networking as Business Watchdog

Eureka Pizza will continue to get my business. Vistaprint will not. Off The Press Printing won’t either. Cox Communications will. [Yikes. Sorry for the length of this.]

How many times have we been lured into buying a product or service that turned into a disaster, or just simply didn’t pan out? Were we persuaded by the promise of good “support” in case something goes wrong? It seems that the bigger and, perhaps, more geographically distant the business, the worse the experience can be. It can be incredibly frustrating to feel that you’re being taken advantage of and have lost money.

In the past, when we had poor results from a business we were only able to moan to a few friends at the party, or threaten to “call the CEO” or in worst-case scenarios sue the company, which very few people ever did.

I had a less-than-positive experience with the businesses listed above. In each case, a combination of promised services, ensuing frustration, an iPhone, Twitter feeding into Facebook, and the entitled modern consumer, led directly to a discussion with a representative of the business itself. A smart business today employs tactics to instantly head off any negative feedback by following Twitter’s trending topics or any reference to their business. The important factor is what the business does with any negative tweets.

Lately, I’ve been debating the relevance of social networking tools, such as Twitter and Facebook, as a “watchdog” of business performance. This hive-mind collective system we have of “friends” and “followers” who can receive instant positive or negative reviews to their phones and computers within seconds of the “broadcast” really changes the whole system of user and customer reviews. When the Web itself became a massive conduit of the judging of business performance on Web sites such as Epinions.com and on the retailer’s own site, the game of purchasing changed completely. I NEVER shop for something online without reading the customer comments/reviews and almost always base my final decision on the reviews of a product or service. Only problem was, these are random people with all kinds of taste, from even possibly a few years in the past, in various parts of the world, with possibly nothing in common to us. If they’re even real or sincere.

Enter social media: Our hundreds of friends, family and work acquaintances instantly receive our review. They know us. We know them. We undoubtedly share certain likes, disklikes, tastes. They sympathize directly with us. They believe us and there’s a good chance they’ll take our purchasing advice. Just think of the “stick-it-to-the-man” potential. If businesses promise results or good service, we should expect it and demand it. It seems that social media channels could be the tool that ensures good quality business.

At Eureka Pizza, a local, really good pizza place here in the area, I recently had, in the end, a good experience. It was three times the combination of an extremely busy week and a matter of minutes to pick up a dinner with the promise of “Hot and Ready” pizzas. The idea, as I understand it, is that you swoop in and buy a pizza that is sitting, waiting for you. For a good price. However, the last three times I went in, there were none ready and I had to wait, one time for 10 minutes. It feels ridiculous typing it, because it’s really not a long time. However, when you’ve got every minute planned with several kids at activities, someone usually sick, places to be, it turns out to be a long time. I was comparing it to the Little Caesar’s “Hot and Ready” pizza in Tucson, which had a stack of pizzas always ready and it took about a minute to go in, get the pizza, pay and leave, even at the rush of dinner time. The crucial part of the discussion is that the pizza is less expensive this way, and you know it’s been sitting there for awhile, it’s not fresh, and that’s OK. It’s cheap and quick and you agree to lose a little quality. For the record, Eureka is way better than Little Caesar’s, even in the “Hot and Ready” scenario, and when we order pizza we usually order from them. (I had a competing, delivery style pizza a few days ago and it was bad bad.)

It was only because of social networking that my “case” reached the owner of Eureka, a discussion came around and I continue to like Eureka Pizza. The owner, Rolf Wilkin, saw my tweet, contacted me, apologized, asked me for more details, and offered to refund my money. Amazing! That’s a great business owner. To do my part, I went in and deleted those tweets and will soon tweet about my continued pizza purchasing from them.

On the opposing front, I ordered a large banner for a one-time event from Vistaprint, along with some flyers and t-shirts. The flyers and t-shirt came, but the banner did not and wasn’t going to. It was massively disappointing and we were furious. I called, quoted the “satisfaction” language from their site. I sent out a tweet about never using them again, detailing my experience in opposition to their Web site’s claim of “Guarantee of Satisfaction” with all the normal “commitment to satisfaction if you’re not 100% satisfied” and all that rubbish. Someone from that company saw my tweet and asked me how they could “help,” and I eventually talked to some deadpan person on the phone in India who just basically said there’s nothing they could [would] do, there was a problem in prodution (not my fault they admitted) and there was no way they could have it to me. They wouldn’t even refund the shipping to make me happy or even talk about quickly printing the banner, Fed-Exing it to me for my one-time event. I could go on, but I won’t. I now use Print Place for everything else and they’ve been great.

A local print shop, Off The Press, treated me rudely. The owner disparaged the quality of my work, my students, and ignored requests for a press check. It was bizarre. I tweeted/facebook-ed it and several friends and acquaintances agreed to not use them. They lost not only my future work but others.

Cox was to show up one morning to install high-speed internet. Their service is way faster than AT&T’s DSL and seems low-cost for the fast service. However, they didn’t show up. I tweeted/facebooked about the classic case of “waiting for the cable guy” who never came… Someone at Cox in Missouri Direct Messaged me with “How can I help?” and she meant it. She took care of it (they had it scheduled wrong on their end) and got me a quick install for the next day. Day of, she followed up. All able to happen because of these social networking tools.

So, to recap (anyone still there?):

Reasons I’ll keep going to Eureka Pizza

• Good pizza
• Good price
• Local business
• Conscientious and respectable owner

Reasons I’ll never use Vistaprint again

• Remote, faceless owners
• Indian tech support. I’m not sure what it is about the combination and our system of corporate capitalism and something over there, but the near-universal bad experience with Indian tech support is infinitely more frustrating than the malfunctioning product itself. The sly using of some American-sounding name. The attempt to speak with an American accent. The experience is riddled with deceit from the start! (Indian people? Always have loved all the Indian people and students I’ve met and worked with. And the food!)
• Unsatisfactory compensation when they screwed up

Reasons I’ll keep using Cox internet

• A nice, semi-local contact
• I have to — it’s the best provider of high-speed internet
• Good price for high-speed

Personal Goals Based on the above experiences:

• Continue to send out more and more tweets when I’ve had a positive experience with a business, such as the service, food and atmosphere that we’ve gotten at Geraldi’s restaurant. Every time I go, I’m practically sloshing red sauce into my phone “keys” as I can’t wait to spread the wonder of the food to my friends and “followers.” Many of my friends have gone to that restaurant based on my recommendations and have also loved it. Same with Petra Cafe.
• Try to keep perspective before I tweet
• Tweet ever more about positive local business experiences

Blog post [to] Twitter test

Attempting to further integrate Twitter into the mix.

Twitter update

I promised my esteemed colleagues that I would try Twitter. So far I’ve only posted a few things, but I’ve been using iChat (AIM) to send and receive messages, as well as Twitterific, which I greatly prefer now. So at this point, my Twitterings have gone through the Web site, the chat world and the Twitterific world, not to mention if any of my poor Friends are receiving my tweets through their mobiles. I’m still uncertain at this point what to think: I like the connection to my friends and colleagues, while most of the time (no offense) the entries are just passing thoughts. I do still wonder if my workflow performance will take a major hit by reading and posting tweets. Seems like it would, doesn’t it? Ironically, what I thought was the silliest use of Twitter, from a mobile phone, I now see as the way of wasting the least amount of time. I can envision sitting in traffic or in line and sending out tweets, as there’s nothing else to accomplish at the moment.

[update 5/8/07] I think I’m failing. I just can’t afford to keep typing into the box what I’m doing at the moment, as I multitask. Twittering becomes another task in the load. Using iChat, Twitterific, the WordPress blog-to-Twitter plug-in and Firefox twitbin plug-in. It has been fun to keep tabs on what my colleagues (”Friends” in twitter) are doing, but even that has been hard to keep reading. The more time I spend in the browser (Firefox), though, grading, blogging, and other things, the twitbin sidebar has been the most valuable so far.

Schooled on Twitter, so giving it a try

I’ve been schooled on Twitter via Twitter itself! Alan Levine tweeted about my too-harsh post, as I wondered about Twitter. Comments have come so far by Rachel, Brian, Alan (whose great comment is stuck in Akismet Spam hell right now!), Josh and some others.

So far, the comments from the Twitter users have basically been: “Step off, son!” They have a good point: don’t knock it ’til you try it. So I’ll try it. I still think it’s “All about me,” but sometimes in a good way, to a group of people who may care. One thing is for certain: if you use Twitter, it in itself has become a dear friend, and I just insulted a bunch of people’s dear friend!

So I’m naturally going to start using Twitter to understand it more. I’ll update this page with my progress. View both the constructive and less-than-constructive comments I received on the original post here.

Twitter users please note that I’ve tagged this entry as “Tools” as part of my penance.

The Twitter Life Cycle

Here is Alan Levine’s flickr diagram on how he became hooked on Twitter. Alan is the Director of Member and Technology Resources at the New Media Consortium. He went from thinking it’s stupid to being hooked. Is it inevitable? (By the way… I REALLY trust Alan, that’s partially why I’m in this quandary).

It’s official: it’s all about “me” (Twitter)

When you have a presence on the Web, there’s an assumption that someone will care enough to read it. From the early days of the gray-background “Welcome to my Web page!” to the incessant blogging of the minutiae of our lives and thoughts (like this…), many people are interested in updating their friends, family and the world on their activities and receiving some feedback via the comments link or old-skool E-mail. With chat, you synchronously carry on a conversation with someone that’s (probably) not in the same room and interact as a somewhat traditional human being. SMS, texting on phones and all that included. Then comes along Twitter. From what I can tell, it’s texting or chat in an asynchronous format, with no expectation of a reply, or at least not right away. People who twitter send out short bursts of text that deal with what they’re doing “RIGHT NOW,” often posted from a phone or some mobile device. It’s roughly similar, I guess, to your iChat status being set to the song playing in iTunes in its expectation that your buddies are interested in reading the title of what you’re listening to, but much much sillier. When shooting out a twitter message, all the people who are your “Friends” and “Followers” receive it probably instantly. “Doin the TWIt…..Doin the TWIT….baby,” or “i’ve got ten minutes to get to work. i haven’t showered yet. this is going to be amazing.” or “Signing off….” Am I alone in seeing the irony of taking the time to post that you’re very late for work or that you’re turning off your computer or posting about actually using Twitter? Am I old? Am I completely out of it? Comments welcome from Twitter-ers and non.