Tweet, Tweet, who’s there?

I’ve come to the conclusion that with social media it can be all too easy to concentrate on the negatives when things have gone wrong.  You only have to look at a couple of the posts that I have written for the Spark blog to confirm that is the case.  However, over the last few weeks I’ve seen a couple of instances which have shown that humility can go a long way in appeasing customers venting their frustrations over the likes of Twitter and Facebook.

A lot has been written about the recent O2 outage and indeed this was an issue that one of Spark’s clients Compuware had a strong opinion about. But there was also a lot of generally positive coverage regarding how the company dealt with the crisis over Twitter, showing customers a human side in the face of a barrage of complaints.

On a more personal front after receiving what seemed like my weekly piece of junk mail from Virgin Media I tweeted “Finally found someone who appreciates Virgin Media Junk mail” with a picture of my 5 month old daughter eating the said junk mail.  This was then followed the morning afterwards with a tweet directly from @Virginmedia who replied “Haha! Very cute =)”.  It may not have stopped the barrage of junk mail just yet but it did get me thinking of Virgin Media in a much more positive light – so it is one up for their social media team.

Clearly many companies can be very heavy handed when it comes to interacting on social media; you only have to look at Yodel going directly to Twitter to try and have negative tweets removed (NB. the irony being that based on recent personal experience, Yodel’s Twitter team seem to be doing a relatively good job fixing the mistakes of their delivery staff).  Like most things in life a calm (and sometimes humorous) approach is the best way forwards and in social media it isn’t any different.