4 comments

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  CraigK

  8 months ago

  It's harder for a larger company to have a real personal voice on Twitter. I always thought of a Twitter account for a business to strictly used as more of a bulletin board for a company highlighting their activities and updates on current projects. Also to directly get in contact with users to have questions, another way of customer service. I don't think a company should get more personal than that.
  
  Craig
  www.budgetpulse.com
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  Brian

  8 months ago

  I tend to lean to the personal side. I do represent my company Twitter and I do like to give a more personal, friendly feel to my tweets. The size of the company does have a lot to do with the voice of the twitter feed. It is refreshing to see a large company with a strong twitter feed voice like Zappos, rather than just another marketing/news feed.
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  ehm2943

  8 months ago

  Working for big global companies supporting large scale systems, CSR (customer service relations) application's SLA (service level agreement) are real high especially on availability. Social tools like twitter extends any company's (regardless of size or location) ability to provide genuine customer service. I see Twitter as the front end of Customer Service w/o the automated VRU (voice response unit), or backend office support from India or other countries that you can't call back. Companies that succeed now a days are those that support their users - not fight them. The internet - web2.0 and other new social tools have arrived and are here to stay. The earlier they figure this out, the better they are. My opinion - the big challenge is not the tool but the customers - their language, culture, social politics, etc. and how companies can provide effective support to them 24/7 . Like it or not, Twitter is a utility like 911 that people used as seen advertised by the media during emergencies i.e. earthquakes, fire, etc. I don't see why this function cannot be incorporated in any company's CSR's production cycle.
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  Chris Slemp

  8 months ago

  I agree with Craig - I work at Microsoft on the MSDN team, and what we've done is started to use the /msdn account for broad announcements, status updates, and the like. (It doesn't have many followers because we're just getting started with this.) I monitor it, but not often. I use my personal account to build a follower network of people that I can interact with on the personal level.
  
  One other comment, though... I'm interested in how companies get behind (in terms of an SLA) the social-support channels versus their "official" support channels. I suppose Frank Eliason would be one of the best to ask.
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