What If You "Catch Fire" On Twitter?

3 replies
Hi Folks

After much resistance, I've finally joined the Twitter party (no, that's not my real eye!), so I'll finally get to see how many of my wackier spontaneous thoughts I can avoid posting

Anyway, I've just been reading a great case study written by Ron Ploof, which shows the "double-edged sword" power of Twitter.

Some legal action taken by the Ford Motor Company against a website created a storm of controversy on Twitter and threatened to break out into a larger media fire. The case study is really about how Scott Monty, who heads up social media at Ford, managed to put out the fire in under 24 hours, in part using some nifty Tweeting.

Click Here To Read The PDF Report In Your Browser (Or Right-Click To Download)

I thought the case study was pretty interesting, and it raised issues that every Warrior needs to consider, such as...

- The power of leverage and "retweets" (Scott asked his followers to retweet his responses, so that those who were fanning the flames would get to see what was going on from Ford's side)

- How to handle potentially bad publicity. For instance, what happens when a customer bad-mouths you on Twitter? What will you do?

- The viral nature of Twitter, and the speed at which thoughts, opinions and messages (both positive AND negative) can be spread.

Fot those reasons, I thought I'd share it with you good folks at the Warrior Forum.

And I'd like to hear your thoughts:

What did you think of the case study?

What did you get out of it that will help you in your business?
#catch fire #twitter
  • Profile picture of the author milan
    Some great lessons there and your description of the pdf is excellent. Thank you.
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  • Profile picture of the author BrianMcLeod
    @ComcastCares is a good study of how to mitigate customer trash-talking with personal attention.

    @Flocker stays on top of the "flock" for the browser company and does a fine job of it.

    Those two are just a couple that I've personally interacted with on Twitter.

    The real-time nature of the conversation on Twitter is very unique and powerful compared to the usual gripe-site badmouthing that companies contend with. A blog post bitching about a product or service or person is fairly one-sided, even if you comment. But when it happens on Twitter, just getting a direct response seems to change the dynamic immediately.

    My state changed instantly when I was pissy about Comcast one day and their guy popped into my timeline to see if he could help.

    Excellent thread and case study, Paul. Thanks for that and kudos for posting.

    Brian
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  • Profile picture of the author Paul Hancox
    Hey Brian - it's good to hear of companies like that quickly "getting" social media networks like Twitter, and using them to improve customer service.

    I think it's going to be *real* interesting to see if "internet marketers" can also do the same thing
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