Less than two weeks ago, I posted a grumbly tweet on Twitter, complaining that my phone line was down and blaming BT. Within a few minutes, someone from the BT Care team had posted a friendly reply:

I think the operative word here is ’someone’ - a real person! She sympathised with my situation (”Not so good”) and encouraged me to contact her privately (DM = Direct Message in Twitterland) to explain the situation. No waiting ‘on hold’ for hours; no being passed from one gruff person to another and having to explain the problem over and over again. Nope! She phoned my mobile straight away and offered to send out an engineer, keeping closely in touch until the problem was solved. 

I’ve had run-ins with BT in the past. It took my partner and me six months to get a phone line when we first bought our apartment. We suffered from missing equipment, wrong bills, rude call-centre staff, crossed wires (metaphorically and literally)  … I won’t tell you what we decided the initials BT stood for. But thanks to a forward-thinking approach to Twitter, the organisation has gone a long way towards redeeming itself in my eyes. Just as I used to moan about BT to anyone bored enough to listen, I will now tell the story of how it used Twitter to fix my phone line.

Big companies just cannot afford not to monitor what people are saying about them, in real time and in the real world (well, the Twitter world). Those that use online social networking wisely may get publicity far more valuable than any quirky advertising campaign: genuine praise from happy customers.