Relationship Maintenance Strategies On Chinese Fortune 500 Company Websites May 7 2010

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Relationship Maintenance Strategies On Chinese Fortune 500 Company Websites May 7 2010

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Scribd, the Textual Contents’ YouTube

Scribd eBook Scribd Community

This week I am going to introduce to you Scribd, which I think is a good tool for my class project presentation.

I see the competition of Kindle and iPad stems from the division of stakeholders with textual thinking habit and those with visual thinking habit. In social media field, we can also see the such division of channels. Scribd acts as a textual contents’ YouTube is becoming more and more popular. This online platform enable people publish and discover documents on the web. Working like YouTube, Scribd hosts the library of uploaded texts instead of videos. The Scribd representative claim that people can find more information on their site than on Wikipedia—about 5 billion words versus 2 billion. Unlike blogs, the content on Scribd keeps its original textual format (font size, color, type and many other rich formats like pdf, docs, PowerPoint slides etc.) The site will automatically change those formats into flash file which enables the faster and easier reading experience.

It can be another important promotion tool for PR practitioners.

First, Scribd has tags for embedding documents onto the company’s website, or other social media site (e.g., blogs, Facebook, MySpace): the document can be embedded to those sites like an embedded video. This makes those sites with more varieties of contents that fulfill more stakeholders’ needs.

Second, we can create and track the online communities on Scribd. People can share and find new content by joining a Group on Scribd or start one of their own. The common interest brings people together who can participate in discussion threads.

Third, we can tract and evaluate the popularization of the content through browsing by what's popular—Most Viewed, Most Liked, and Most Discussed.

Changing PR Strategies for Social Media Channels-- A Case Study II

In summary, from the crisis communication perspective, I find several points worth mentioning during the current social media age:

Social media provide both opportunities and challenges to crisis management. It provids increased visibility and exposure of both positive and negative events of the company; it reaches customers/consumers directly; it provides ready-to-access online content for stakeholders; it owns uncontrollable bloggers who express their opinions; it, thus, change the new reporting system of previous dominated by traditional new media.

A dilemma of “The stakeholders perceive it as the crisis, then it is the crisis.” Due to power, legitimacy and willingness to confront differences, sometimes not all the stakeholders’ rights are equally emphasized. E.g., government cares only about its own country’s benefit, major media agenda setting and non-setting. But due to the raising power of social media channels, there is the increasing vocal of those ignored stakeholder (e.g., Indonesian fisherman claim their rights through their government, International law suit, etc). And these raising channels, if are not handled well, will worsen the crisis.

Information consistency does not solely mean speak in same voice, it also includes the integration and consensus of different media channels including traditional ones and social media channels which represent different stakeholder groups. E.g., Australia government can hold public hearing of oil flow rate with WWF, Geoscience, Greeens, PTTEP and all other economic and social groups, to work out a estimate plan to get the precise oil leaking rate as well as objective crisis evaluation.

Always being aware of the MUM effect and take multiple perspectives of stakeholders. The social or economic attachment to the organization may easily lead the members to take the perspective of organization when making sense the crisis. Taking a multiple perspectives of stakeholders and being open to different voices are two ways of dealing with MUM effect.

Changing PR Strategies for Social Media Channels-- A Case Study I

The practice of news reporting is changing due to the advancement of technology, and so is the crisis management (as well as the creation and delivery of news). This week I am going to share with you an unsuccessful case of corporate crisis management. In this case, the company solely focused on the relationship management with the traditional media sources. Those traditional resources chose to narrow their report of the crisis because of the crisis event happened far from their major audience and were lacking of relevancy with them. However, the overlooked social media channels with its strong technology support and multimedia reports expressed to the world such event and, to some extent, exposed the event in a more serious fashion.

On August 21, 2009, a Thai owned oil company PTTEP’s production well suffered a dramatic well-control accident. The accident occurred in an area known as the Montara Oil Field in the Timor Sea, more than 200km northwest of the Kimberley coastline, Australia. According to PTTEP, the well began pouring oil and gas into the Timor Sea at a rate of between 300 and 400 barrels a day, and three failed attempts have been made to plug the leaking well till Oct 22 (eight weeks) according to news.com.au, and a fourth attempt to plug the well has been delayed and will be made on Oct 28 according to Australia Network News, Oct 27, 2009.

Although compared with Exxon Valdez oil spill case, the leaking and polluting scale is much smaller in Montara case, several new features of this crisis in organization responses, stakeholder involvement, media coverage, and information strategy indicate that the crisis is going worse (for the leaking perhaps, but the organization is for sure).Urgent crisis management measures should be taken in order not to make this “small scale” crisis as notorious as Exxon Valdez case.

Stakeholder Analysis: Out-of-Sight Out-of-Mind Syndrome is Brewing a Crisis Storm

Australia government and PTTEP Company: complacent to the issue

Power: both sides have the power (the former authorized the latter the right of offshore drill); Legitimacy: it has been questioned by Senator Brown: “West Atlas spill [this Montara spill] should force a reassessment of the proposed Gorgon gas project [another ongoing seadrill project] off the Pilbara coast,” given the current uncontrollable situation of Montara spill;Willingness to confront: since the leaking site is off the coast of Darwin, off the Northern Territory and Western Australia, and the area is also with scarce previous studies of marine life and with no baseline survey of the vulnerability of adjacent ecosystems or marine wildlife by the company or its predecessors, Australia government “is showing signs of complacency over the seriousness of the oil slick and the issues it might pose for marine life.” (Greg Hunt)

Traditional Media vs. Social Media: Different degree of passion in reporting

Agenda setting role of media is apparent when comparing this case with Exxon Valdez spill. The out-of-sight out-of-mind syndrome appears in the major western media community, when dealing with Motara spill crisis. I have searched the news about Motara leak/PTTEP/Timor Sear spill in CNN, MSNBC, BBC, and NBC news site, there are very few reports about the crisis. Most of these sites just quote some of the PTTEP newsletter or government statement. On the contrary, the new social media channels show more interests to this crisis, and report it through multimedia tools: Al Jazeera post an interview of WWF on Timor oil spill on Oct 24, 2009 on Youtube; guardian.co.uk hosts a online photo site monitoring the leaking. Australia Network news provides audio form of interview online. But in general, since the lacking of focus by major media community, Montara leak crisis is not listed into the public agenda. So it, to some degree, worsened the out-of-sight syndrome and makes the crisis signals more hidden until it blasts out some day.

YouTube Channels for Universities #3

Based on previous analysis of university YouTube Channels, the following are my Top 10 YouTube suggestions for the organizations considering using the YouTube channels:

1. To theme the graphic design of the channels and make the whole tone and manner integrated with the organization’s main webpage, e.g., same layout, background color and patterns, font type and font sizes.

2. Create and get full use of YouTube video playlists featuring high-ranking videos compatible with the organization’s brand image, values and goals. For example, create playlists containing five videos (including one made by the organization) that are related to the organization’s industry or brand value. This will help drive traffic to the channel.

3. Associate the organization’s YouTube Channel with established YouTube channels related to business or industry.

4. Tag the videos with keywords and proper names, and add descriptions to each video. The most important word to be included in the tags is the word “video.” So, the tag can follow the format “(fill-in-the-blank) video.” For example, if you have produced a video about public relations, tag your video “public relations video.” Moreover, tag the video with the name of the organization all the time.

5. To favorite a few, related, high-quality videos to put video content on the organization’s channel. The videos being “favorited” are often well-produced and present the messages, values and goals in line with the organizations. So, at a glance, they look like video content of the organization.

6. Comment on videos and channels. Comment something nice on others’ channels and leave a link to the organization’s own channel. When getting the comment from others, respond to them in different ways, for example, use the video response to attract more attention from audiences.

7. Use closed-captioning for videos and activate the instant-on function to drive the traffic. In addition, make full use the annotations embedded in video playing, adding some comments during the video here and there to remind the viewers to click the organization’s link.

8. Use more interactive blocks for content. The enhanced channels provide more “Side Boxes” and “Branding Boxes” to subscribe viewers with comments.

9. Use interactive banners linking viewers directly to the organization’s website and creating seamless integration of brand. Banners can also be mapped enable direct links to different pages.

10. Put other social media icons in the YouTube channel and interlink the channel to those social networks in order to increase popularity and integrate the social media resources.

YouTube Channels for Universities #2

My analysis will mainly focus on several highlights of the best channel (i.e., from UniversityPennsylvania) as well as some pitfalls from other channels in order to show how well YouTube channels can help these universities pursuing the goal of teaching, research and service.

The UniversityPennsylvania channel is a very well-developed institution channel with clear brand promoting strategies.

• First, when first log in to their site, it makes you feel that you just open another web page of its school website. Because there are highly integrated channel background colors (navy blue with watermarks of the school building picture), format, font type and size.
• Second, the Instant-on introductory video quickly catches your attention with closed-captioning that makes messages from the video clearer. Only two of the ten observed channels activate the closed-captioning function.
• Third, the channel uses the Interactive Banners linking viewers directly to the school main website and creating seamless integration of the school images and messages. Moreover, the channel adds four small icons at the top right corner of the site which represent “About Penn,” “Admissions,” “Academics,” “Research” respectively, and each icon is mapped enable direct links to relevant pages of the school website. Similarly, UHuston channel uses the interactive banners at top right of the site but they link audiences to its three separated YouTube sub-channels—“courses,” “multimedia,” and “departments.” Such embeddedness of webpage elements to the YouTube channel is an important successful experience of channel design, which offered online audience familiar feeling between YouTube channels and official sites. The interactive banners play the important bridge roles between YouTube channel and the school, and well reflect the strategic goals of the school to promote teaching, research and service.
• Fourth, the interlink icons are provided between YouTube channels and other social media sites (e.g., Twitter, Facebook, Flickr). This is the unique feature of UniversityPennsylvania channel. In doing so, the university channel creates its own social networks and gets full use of other social media channels to increase its traffic.
• Fifth, in order to better promote the teaching goals, the videos being uploaded on university channels are supported with unlimited play time and up to 20 Gigabyte (three hours of video). This allows the schools to broadcast lectures, classes and speeches. This is the most unique feature and advantage of university channel over other private or corporate YouTube channels—they share with the world the schools’ strong academic resources, which, in turn, attract more students to the channels. Most of the ten channels I observed have uploaded such academic videos ranging from 25 minutes to 2 hours and 28 minutes.
• The sixth, which is the area, I think, UniversityPennsylvania needs to improve, is the use of playlist. Specifically, some channels (e.g., texastech and Arizona), although with fewer uploaded videos produced by themselves, build playlists with the mixed videos of their own and those from external sources as supplement. Those external videos are mostly featuring high-ranking videos compatible with the schools’ strategy. Texastech categorizes its playlist into eight classes, for example “Academics and Research,” “Campus Life,” “The Texas Tech Vietnam Center,” and “Texas Tech University Celtic.” The videos within each class are from a large variety of sources, but under the same theme. Through this smart use of the playlist, Texastech’s total upload view ranks the first among all ten channels.
• Seventh, in order to promote the school’s desire of serving the local community, some universities directly embed local TV news in their YouTube channels broadcasting their social event or community activities. For example, UniversityofVirginia post a NBC news report of a local high school student volunteering to support the using of google fiber in the school community region. It is very smart to post a non-university produced and seemingly non-university business report on the school’s channel. Because it expresses, implicitly, the university’s support to the adoption of new technology which echoes the voices of local community as well as the demands of a large amount of high-school students who will also be the potential university recruits. Such video posts not only strengthen the social tie of the university and the local community, but also enhance the university’s reputation among high school students—the potential customers of the university.

YouTube Channels for Universities #1

The YouTube channel becomes an increasingly important part of universities’ social media tools given the fact that (a) it is the second largest search engine (after google); (b) it comes up during a google search; and (c) more and more students search their colleges on YouTube. The university channels, especially those enhanced channels, are equipped with advanced functions for educational institutions to use. My ten observed university channels reflect how different universities develop such social media tools to various degrees, and as a result, generate different level of impact on their audiences.

http://www.youtube.com/user/OhioStateUniversity

http://www.youtube.com/user/UnivPennsylvania

http://www.youtube.com/user/Arizona

http://www.youtube.com/user/UOregon

http://www.youtube.com/user/texastech

http://www.youtube.com/user/UniversityofVirginia

http://www.youtube.com/user/UHouston

http://www.youtube.com/user/CornellUniversity

http://www.youtube.com/user/UCDavis

http://www.youtube.com/user/UniversityTennessee

In general, all ten universities are aware of the two main elements of their YouTube channels: the video content and the channel design.

First, these universities, although to different degrees, strategically produce YouTube videos promoting the university image (through introductory videos), academic and research resources (through faculty lecture and speech videos, and academic department introduction videos), student life (through student made videos on sports, clubs, volunteering activities), and community networking (through community service activity videos, alumni event videos, and retrieved local news reports).

Second, their intentional channel design also shows that these universities are making effort to exploit YouTube for enhancing their popularity and impact among audiences. For example, most of the ten universities employ designed channel background (frames, colors, background pictures, school logos etc.) rather than the default layout provided by YouTube. They create well written descriptions and proper titles for each video, as well as introductions for themselves in “about me” section.

IMC in personal branding

A personal brand is a perception or emotion maintained by somebody other than you describing the total experience of having a relationship with you. Personal branding is the process by which individuals and entrepreneurs differentiate themselves by identifying and articulating their unique values and then leveraging it across multiple platforms with a consistent message and image to help achieve a specific goal.

Given the current advancement of social media, we have many choices of tools for selling ourselves to the potential employers; and on the other hand, employers have many different ways to approach us employing the same social media channels. So how to integratedly utilize various of social media tools becomes essential for the success of finding a job position or a good-fit employee.

We can refer to the definition of Integrated Marketing Communication (IMC) which advocates synergistic approach to achieving the objectives of a marketing campaign, through a well coordinated use of different promotional methods. As defined by the American Association of Advertising Agencies, IMC ". . . recognizes the value of a comprehensive plan that evaluates the strategic roles of a variety of communication disciplines advertising, public relations, personal selling, and sales promotion and combines them to provide clarity, consistency, and maximum communication impact. "

I found the following video useful for us to learn how to integrate our current social media sites and create an coordinated positive image, consistency of our online exposures.

Enjoy!

Personal Branding and Self-Marketing Sources

Personal branding and self-marketing are hot topics among my peers of graduate students these days, because we have all passed the comprehensive exams of the program and will graduate and enter into the job market in this May. So this week I am going to post some useful links of promoting personal branding. The sources are retrieved from http://www.quintcareers.com/career_branding.html by Randall S. Hansen, Ph.D

Quintessential Careers Career Branding & Marketing Resources:

• Building Your Online Career Brand: Five Tools for Job-Seekers. Discusses five tools job-seekers should use to build and maintain an online career brand.
• Building Your Personal Brand: Tactics for Successful Career Branding. Discusses five branding tactics to take charge and build your personal brand.
• Career Branding: What's the Value of Your Personal Brand? A Quintessential Careers Quiz -- find the value of your personal brand image in maximizing your career brand for promotions and new jobs with this free quiz.
• Career Branding Tutorial -- designed to help you take your career to the next level... filled with (free) insights, tips, and tools to assist you in the creation or refinement of your career brand.
• Career Storytelling Tools for Job-Seekers -- where you will learn about the power of storytelling to propel your career to the next level, including free tips, tools, and more.
• A Dozen Things You Must Know About Communicating Your Career Brand. Learn strategies for communicating your brand.
• The Elevator Speech is the Swiss Army Knife of Job-Search Tools. Learn how to develop and use this key personal branding tool in your job-search. Includes samples.
• The Five-Step Plan for Creating Personal Mission Statements. Here's a five-step plan for creating a mission to enhance your career success.
• Integrating Assessments Into Your Personal and Career Branding. Shows you how you can use the details from career assessment results to build or strengthen your career branding efforts.
• Is "The Breakfast of Champions" in Your Resume? How can job-seekers stand out from the crowd of other job-seekers competing for the same job? By using proven marketing and branding techniques.
• Marketing is How You Show Others How You Can Help Them, Including Selling Yourself for Jobs and Promotions. Shows you how job-hunting is all about using marketing skills, including selling yourself in job interviews for job offers.
• SEO for Job-Seekers: 10 Tips for Building Your Brand and Being Found Online by Employers and Recruiters. Tips for sculpting and managing an online persona, personal brand, digital presence using proven search engine optimization (SEO) methods.
• Take Control of Your Personal Branding. Everyone has a brand. A personal brand is what you do consistently with effectiveness. Learn how to clearly review, define, build your personal brand.
• Using a Career Journal to Further Your Career Development and Empower Your Job-Search. Relates how whether you're a student searching for career direction or a job-seeker thinking of a job or career change, you can benefit from a journaling.
• Using Key Marketing Tools to Position Yourself on the Job Market. Discusses why job-seekers would be wise to take a few lessons from marketing and apply those rules to your job search.
• Using a Personal Mission Statement to Chart Your Career Course. This article takes job-seekers through the self-discovery process of creating your personal mission statement.
• Using a SWOT Analysis in Your Career Planning. Shows how a key strategic planning tool can be successfully applied to marketing yourself and advancing your career.

Other Quintessential Career Marketing Resources:

Career Porfolios:

• Career Portfolio Tools and Resources for Job-Seekers. One of the best ways to build and promote your brand is by creating both a traditional job-search portfolio, as well as an online version. Find the tools you need in this section of Quintessential Careers.

Career and Personal Branding Books:

• Career Branding, Personal Branding, and Career Storytelling Books for Job-Seekers and Entrepreneurs. The Quintessential Careers team has personally selected the best career branding books to help propel your career.

Career and Personal Branding Websites:

• The Brand Called You. An article by business guru Tom Peters, published on FastCompany.com.
• Me Incorporated: Your Own Magnetic Brand. A nice overview of personal branding by Randall Frost on BrandChannel.com.
• Reach Communications Consultancy. A personal branding and performance coaching site that includes an innovative assessment, the 360°Reach Assessment, which helps you get the real story about how you are perceived by those around you.
• ResumeBucket.com -- a great personal branding site where job-seekers can upload up to 20 versions of your resume, which are then converted to Web pages, so that they are available online (each with a unique URL) 24/7 from anywhere in the world -- fully searchable (unless you want to keep it private) and edited with or without HTML tags. The site also includes a quick job-search feature using Indeed.com. No cost to job-seekers.

The Power of Tagging in Persuasion of Consumer Behavior

A video from B J Fogg is worth sharing this week. In the video he briefly introduced how Facebook utilize the tagging photos together with email links to relevant consumers to drive the traffic to their site.

According to Fogg, Facebook open the function for their users to tag friend's photos and share with others. When someone's photo is being tagged, he/she will receiving an automatic email with the direct link to that photo.

To synthesize the points from my last two blog posts, this action has immense power of change that person's behavior because: the direct reach of the person--connectivity (email); convenience and accessibility (direct link that drive the people to the photos without login process); high relevance (his/her own photo being tagged); networks--humanity (a friend or someone knows you tagged your photo). These create the stimulus that triggers people's motivation to change their behaviors. As a result, Facebook successfully persuades the people to visit their site.

8 Killer Social Media and Digital Marketing Quotes

Best quotes heard at the Digital Marketing Mixer (Cited from Jay Baer's post):

“Content Doesn’t Win. Optimized Content Wins” – Li Evans
“People Don’t Expect Your Company to be Perfect. They Expect You to Provide Solutions” –Debra Ellis
“Don’t Train. Simplify” – Dr. BJ Fogg
“Measurement is Like Laundry. It Piles Up the Longer You Wait to Do It” – Amber Naslund
“Your Customers Are Listening in Social Media. And So Are Search Engines” – Li Evans
“Many crummy trials beats the big thinking” – Dr. BJ Fogg
“The Art of Twitter is in the Retweet. You Must be Interesting” – Peter Shankman
“Tactics Without a Strategy is Worse Than Doing Nothing at All” – Li Evans

What’s your favorite idea or quote from the Digital Marketing Mixer? Leave a comment, and let’s chat.

33 tips of Social Media and Digital Marketing Part 2

From the Engaging with Customers sessions

18. Build relationships with fire starters
19. Build community first, monetize later

(Social media community becomes the new brand intangible word of mouth assets in addition to traditional brand awareness, values and key stakeholder loyalties)
20. Offer value on Twitter, don’t self promote
21. Have passion and jump on every possible situation you can on the social Web
22. Build relationships with customers to create a memorable brand experience
23. Set goals, measure, and iterate

(Even the most flexible, adaptive, and natural looking social media site has to be strategically planned. The practitioners create a forum that attracts the consumers’ participation and promotes dialogues under the similar prescribed theme and rules. However, the best strategies of marketing are those accomplishing both brand’s and consumers’ goals, fulfill both brand’s and consumer’s needs, and reframing and unifying various interests under the same framework—the brand values.)
24. Social media guidelines for your company should be short and succinct

(Short and succinct means practitioners have much freedom to adapt their tactics according to the changing of market.)
25. Be organized internally to effectively manage social media externally

(keep communicate to the outside with the same voice, tone and manner, and standpoint)

From the Peer to Peer sessions

26. Blog about how your products/services fit into your customer’s lives
27. Humanize your blog

(Feature of humanity is always the first priority for social media practices)
28. Get your legal counsel talking to other companies that have successfully implemented social media
29. Have conversations with senior management to determine their appetite for social media

(A bottom-up educational popularization of social media marketing is useful to shift the mind of senior management members from traditional media tools to social media)
30. Provide your community something that is personally beneficial to them
31. Let your members decide how they want to use “their” community
32. In online video, be mindful of people’s time, attention and surroundings
33. Use trackable links to measure success

33 tips of Social Media and Digital Marketing Part 1

I just read an article by Jay Baer, who summarized from 2009 digital marketing mixer conference in Chicago 33 tips of Social Media and Digital Marketing. I’d like to share with you these points and some of my ideas in different font color following each points.

From the Marketing Must Knows sessions

1. Build credibility before you sell via social media
2. Allow open (but governed) access for employees to Twitter and blogging
3. Broadcast emails are not effective. Create relevancy and be helpful
4. Use your Facebook fan page to promote key content of your email newsletter
5. Join the right conversations and the right time
6. Think about your Web site’s “front page” as a collection of pages, not one home page
7. Improve search spending ROI by using down-funnel data
8. Invest in social media. It’s not free.

The key advantage of social media as the marketing tool is that it employs the person-centered communication format (i.e., accessibility, topic relevancy, interactivity). So it sets the high bar for social media practitioners (i.e., promoting credibility, investing time and money on social media, participation in dialogues of the consumers)

From the Integrating Marketing Programs sessions

9. Test the unusual
10. Clean up your landing pages
11. Keep your troops informed
12. Insert retweet buttons into PDF files

(That’s an evolutionary practice that leads to the change of traditional one-way author-reader relationships to highly interactive co-authoring relationship. Perhaps, the Amazon Kindle can considering such function since it has already been equipped with the PDF reading and Wikipedia posting functions.)
13. Remove gates in front of your content
14. Use your brand community for market research

15. Engage in online communities as a person first, as a marketer second

(The stress of humanity (e.g., user friendly interface, consumer-centered communication, personalized content) is another important feature of social media. The Social media practitioner should be highly involved into the online activities in order to keep updating their mind of such fast developing new media channels and co-opt it for marketing use.)
16. Use Google keyword tool to learn how customers describe your products/services

17. Optimize all your content for search

Customer Service through Tweets

Social media becomes the catalyst of innovational and evolutional approaches for companies to improve their customer service nowadays.

More than half of the Fortune 100 companies are using Twitter for customer service, recruiting employees, blasting news and announcing promotions, according to the study by public relations firm Burson-Marsteller and its digital-media unit, Proof.

Company	Twitter handle	Off-hour service
Allstate	Allstate	Y
AT&T	ATTNews	Y
Best Buy	BestBuyCMO
Best Buy	Twelpforce
British Airways	BritishAirways
Comcast	ComcastCares	Y
Dell	multiple accounts	Y
Delta Air Lines	DeltaAirLines
DirecTV	DirecTV
Ford	ScottMonty	Y
GE	GE_Reports
General Motors	GMblogs	Y
H&R Block	HRBlock
Hardees	Hardees
Harley-Davidson	harleydavidson
Honda	Alicia_at_Honda	Y
Jet Blue	JetBlue	Y
Marriott Int'l	MarriottIntl
New York Times Co.	NYTimesComm	Y
Nordstrom	Nordstrom	Y
Nortel	Nortel
Oracle	multiple accounts
Pizza Hut	PizzaHut	Y
Popeyes Chicken	PopeyesChicken
Quicken Loans	quickenloans
Renault	Renault_Live	Y
Samsung	SamsungMobileUS	Y
Southwest	SouthwestAir	Y
Starbucks	Starbucks	Y
State Farm	StateFarm
Texas Instrum.	TXInstruments	Y
The Home Depot	homedepot	Y
Toyota	Toyota	Y
Tyson Fds.	TysonFoods
UPS	ThomasAtUPS
Wells Fargo	Ask_WellsFargo	Y
Whole Foods	WholeFoods	Y

source from Nielsen

One of the most important advantages of twitter is that it enables the companies to listen and respond to customers in a genuine and timely manner. From a more historical perspective, twitter set a high bar for the customer service industry—to promote company’s reputation by promising and honoring the promising of instant gratification.

Instant gratification is not the creation of the companies, but, rather, the demand of the customers. They certainly are looking for help on Twitter. In one recent survey, 58% of respondents said if they had tweeted about a bad experience, they would like the company to respond to their comment.

On the other hand, twitter also has its limitations. It is hard to solve the complex issue within 140 characters. That’s why, ideally, Twitter should be one of several customer service solutions (e.g., phone, e-mail and online chat support etc.).