If you’re a Twitter skeptic, you might like to reconsider.
Alison Godfrey has written at News.com.au that using Twitter helped her get the home loan she needed. Her article Commonwealth Bank all a-Twitter over mortgage approval tweet, describes how she turned things around very quickly by using less than 140 characters.
It seems that someone at the Commonwealth Bank saw her tweet about her negative banking experience and the head of Commonwealth Bank’s customer service team was in touch with her within an hour and seventeen minutes. Apparently a lot of the big business players are now monitoring social media to see where they’re being mentioned in cyberspace. I’ll have to keep that in mind when our house sells and we need to confirm our financial arrangements.
By the way, if you are using Twitter, feel free to follow me.
You’ll find my Twitter profile here.
If you don’t twitter and you’re wondering what I’m talking about, Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service, that allows users to send and read other users’ updates (otherwise known as tweets), which are posts of up to 140 characters in length. Sort of a cross between text messaging and blogging.
Find out more at the Twitter page on Wiki.
Colour me cynical, but I wonder if being a journalist for one of the biggest mainstream (old) media sites in the country may have had something to do with CBA’s quick offer to help…? =]
(in which case, you may indeed have some sway!)
That said, its still good to see some of the big australian companies realising the importance of social media channels…
You certainly have a good point, Michael. I’m wondering if the number of Twitter followers would have an impact on the speed at which they do something.
Yes, I thought that too, but she (Alison Godfrey) doesn’t seem to have a huge amount of followers compared to others (like you)… maybe CBA are indeed simply monitoring the twitter-tubes for mentions of their name plus any bad words!
Oh, and i take back my comment about news.com.au being ‘old media’, that was a bit unfair, especially how they are using twitter these days – http://bit.ly/ZrgBX … http://search.twitter.com/search?q=Sydney+blackout – there’s the power of twitter, right there! watch out for those zombies… =]
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