I just wrapped up the 9th Solid Cactus eCommerce Boot Camp that I put together two times a year. It’s a gathering of eCommerce store owners from around the country where they spend three days networking with each other and taking part in seminars put on by both Solid Cactus team members and guest speakers.
One of the big topics during the past two Boot Camps was the power of Social Media and how business owners can take advantage of this free medium to not only engage their customers but monitor their company’s performance. Blogs, Facebook and Twitter give customers the opportunity to heap praise on a company when they do good and lampoon them when they do bad. Keeping a close eye on sites like this and responding to customer inquiries via them is becoming more important every day.
I’ve used Twitter while traveling to say “My flight from FLL on @jetblue has been delayed by two hours. Long night ahead.” And almost instantly, someone from JetBlue responded, “@scottsanfilippo, sorry about that. Weather causing the delay. Shouldn’t be too long.” I tweeted about the great pomegranite martini’s currently being served on US Airways flights, and got a quick tweet back from US Airways saying, “@scottsanfilippo Glad you’re enjoying them. We like them too.”
While sitting in the back of the room during Boot Camp this week, I posted an article to my blog about some poor service I received during a live chat session with a rep from Comcast. When I write a blog post, I also post the link on Twitter and Facebook so my followers can see what I’m up to. When I tweeted, I made sure to put @comcast and @comcastcares into my tweet in case someone from Comcast was on top of things and monitored the Social Media channels.
Comcast does.
Minutes after my post appeared, Bill Gerth from Comcast was in touch with me. Bill’s the Social Media guy for Comcast who monitors @comcastcares and according to his Twitter profile, “makes it right for our customers.” Bill ran my complaint up the ladder, so they say, and I was contacted by Ronda, an Executive Support Specialist, who arranged to have a technician at my house the very next day to resolve my issue.
This is a prime example of how one business – a large business – used the power of Social Media to take a less-than-happy customer and turn him into one of their biggest fans.
I’m going to watch some TV.