Twitter is the NEW Complaint Department & Companies NEED to Keep Up!

In this class, we often discuss how companies can and should use social media to communicate with their customers and target audiences. However, maybe this class is being taught to the wrong generation of people. As Generation Y PR students, we use social media on a daily basis. We grew up with Myspace and Facebook, and therefore recognize the importance of these new communication channels and how they could best be utilized in PR practices. These are concepts that innately make sense to us. But we are not yet in the workforce. Instead, the people running most corporations and companies are from earlier generations, ones that do not fully understand the importance of social media in PR and still see Facebook as a waste of time. While social media has gotten huge amounts of attention in the past few years, many companies still have a long way to go in terms of learning how to communicate with these channels. 


A new study by Maritz Research Company has shown that most companies still have not fully grasped the importance of Twitter, social media's newest fad. Twitter is the new method that consumers use to complain about a product or service, and most companies are just not listening. The study surveyed an online panel of 1,300 consumers who use twitter regularly and have complained about a product, service, brand or company. The findings showed that only about 1/3 of the complaints received a response from the company.


Of the tweeters that received responses: 
83% liked or loved hearing from the company
4% didn't like or hated hearing from the company
3 out of 4 were very or somewhat satisfied with the company's response. 


Of the tweeters who did not receive responses:
86% would have liked or loved hearing from the company
1% would not have liked hearing from the company
63% would not like it or hate it if the company contacted them about something other than their complaint tweet


The numbers don't lie. Today's consumers want to be heard and know they are being heard. The technology is there, corporate America just needs to take hold. 


Article: http://www.prdaily.com/Main/Articles/9758.aspx