Should You Twitter?
August 27th, 2009 by Jeb Foster
Blue Cross Blue Shield now uses Twitter as another customer service channel. You might consider doing the same.
What’s Twitter? It’s a web site that lets you share 140-character messages with your friends and followers. For those who use Facebook: it’s essentially Facebook stripped down to the status-update feature.
More and more companies are using the tool to connect with their customers, and the best among them, like BCBS, use the site less for aggressive marketing than for customer service and low-intensity PR.
(The companies that simply use it as a platform to say how great they are typically quit after a short period, realizing that few people are interested.)
Here are a few other examples of how organizations are using Twitter:
- During the height of the Swine Flu scare, the CDC used regular ‘tweets’ with sober, straightforward information in the midst of a media-fueled panic.
- The Kitchen, a high-end restaurant in Boulder, Colorado, uses the service update followers on their latest culinary concoction.
- Novelist and journalist Susan Orlean updates followers on her life as a writer, generating buzz about her upcoming book in the process.
Twitter can serve as a useful signaling strategy—it conveys a sense of technological savvy, accessibility and even a modicum of hipness. In the case of BCBS, it conveys the sense that, with every new technology, they’re going to try to use it to help their customers.
There’s a lot of hype around Twitter, about its promise and the prospect of parlaying a Twitter account into a glorious money-making and popularity-generating venture.
Problem: if you approach the service with that mentality, you’re probably going to do it wrong, get discouraged and give up.
The real promise of Twitter is that it’s another way to connect with your clients and provide something of value, and like any social endeavor, you get what you give.
