Free Flowers and Beer

A guest blog post from Patrick Farrell, President of Sniper PR, one of Farrell Talbot Consulting's media strategists, chief social media guru, and my smart younger brother.

Twitter – just the thought of it can make companies cringe.  The social networking site continues to be a mystery for some companies and can cause them a boat-load of frustration.  There is a constant struggle to post timely and impactful original content that engages influencers and reaches the right influencers.  Simply put, companies know that they should be tweeting, but they’re not sure why.

There are multiple reasons why an organization should consider engaging in a Twitter program. These include:

• Your customers are on Twitter and you should be too
• Twitter creates visibility for your brand
• There is incredible opportunity to control your own message

I want to share with you two great examples of another reason to be on Twitter, though – a chance to communicate and engage with “real” customers that care about your brand.  Enhancing the consumer experience is king these days, and Twitter is an incredible tool for this.

Sending flowers to my wife on Valentine's Day is an important husband duty; and so I arranged to send flowers to my wife’s work using 1-800-Flowers. She called me on her way home to discuss her day, and to my surprise, she never received them. I was not happy! The 1-800-Flowers website was down and the hold time for customer service was an hour (Not surprising given the day!) I decided to take my concerns to Twitter. And it goes a little something like this….

Wow- glad that worked out. I am even teaching my wife a thing or two. She had this interaction with Sam Adams a few weeks ago. She opened her beer and noticed the bottle was broken at the top. It went a little something like this…

Per Sam Adam’s directions, my wife drafted and sent an email to them explaining what had happened.  You can imagine her surprise when she received the following letter:

The power of Twitter! As you can see, from the customer point of view, Twitter is a tool that enables customers to connect with brands in a manner that was previously impossible.  Common annoyances can be taken care of quickly and as a result a company’s targeted consumer will remain loyal to a brand.  While it can be scary at first, Twitter is simply like swimming.  Sometimes you just need to jump in the water – it’s fine.