Twitter witter ……

Some amazing things can happen due to Twitter and it’s not just a place where you get banal rumblings from celebrities to your mate at work – they can be life changing in the US they are often being used as a tool to get homeless people back into housing etc and from a PR perspective they can be excellent brand awareness and selling tool.

We now live in Google World where everything can be viewed by Google so put a name or brand in and off you go you can see peoples Facebook’s, Linked In, Twitter stream and all the other trails across the internet but if you have made a gaffe or got too open or just made a mistake then it’s there like a glaring sore thumb.

If you post drunken pictures of yourself on Facebook and don’t get a job because of this then silly you – check your privacy settings and maybe modify your behaviour but as a brand or business then how do you deal with it there are plenty of people who have trod the path of social media and screwed up for me to mention but this week doing some research on Twitter and Facebook and social media it’s obvious that some brands are just on transmit and not receive, they are just fog horning their  message out there not interacting in anyway and then when consumer seeks redress they go elsewhere. If they can’t get their voice heard via your twitter or Facebook pages they can either use a blog or go to any number of forums and spout of there and then show up and never disappear in a Google search and more often than not it’s all because they want a telephone number which for some reason companies prefer not to put onto their site – so by the magic karma of the internet bad publicity always attracts loads of comment!

So make sure the whole company is involved in social media and you listen as well as shout but also think about this if you’re asking for someone’s three precious security numbers on the back of their card to make a purchase why can’t you give them your phone number?