Twitter chief executive and co-founder Jack Dorsey is trying to make Twitter more business friendly. Photo: AP
Social media can be a dangerous place for business. Just look at the reaction last month when discount supermarket ALDI took to Twitter asking customers to "fill in the blanks" on the phrase "I became an ALDI lover when I tasted ___ for the first time".
Photo: Twitter
From an online reputation point of view when you are trying to address issues you take them offline.
Gerry McCusker
Unsurprisingly the campaign swiftly garnered some unintended responses with ALDI realising the error of its ways and deleting the post.
.@ALDIAustralia I became an ALDI lover until I realised you're a foreign private owned company that sends profits overseas to Germany.
— Cameron Bradley (@_Cameron_B) January 29, 2016
#feedback #tellus #ALDI I became an ALDI lover when I tasted the sad, bitter taste of deleted tweets for the first time.
— Duncan Bayne (@duncan_bayne) January 29, 2016
Other businesses to incur the wrath of the Twitterati include meal delivery service SupperTime's advertising leaflet drop and last year's ill-fated #yourTaxi campaign.
Taking criticism offline
Just one customer complaint can quickly become a social media firestorm, so businesses are welcoming changes implemented by Twitter on Thursday that enable them to take criticism offline.
All businesses can now add a link to their tweets that automatically displays a call to action button, which allows the customer to send the business a direct message rather than airing their dirty laundry publicly.
In the future selected businesses will also be able to use a customer feedback feature that will allow users to privately share their opinions with a business after a service interaction, according to Twitter's blog post outlining the changes.
Jenny Goodridge, head of business development and platform partnerships at Twitter, says customer service conversations often start in tweets but need to be transitioned to a private channel when personal information is required.
"These are the first features built specifically to meet the needs of customer service teams," she says. "We know that every Twitter user has at some stage engaged with a business or a brand."
Goodridge says "millions" of customer service-related interactions happen every month on Twitter with some businesses fielding over 80 per cent of their inbound social customer service requests via the platform.
"Brands using customer service on Twitter see a decrease in the cost of resolution," Goodridge says. "We think that we are improving what brands are already doing to date. The initial feedback is very positive."
Goodridge says Twitter will be unveiling more new features and is "excited about making future announcements over the next few months".
A shift in direction
Online reputation management expert Gerry McCusker says the new features appear to be part of Twitter's tactical search for relevance as the platform's user growth stagnates.
"It looks to me like they are trying to rebrand themselves as a business transactional tool," McCusker says. "They are moving from being a tool of the citizen to a tool of the corporation."
McCusker says the new features are likely to provide monetisation opportunities for Twitter but represent a shift by the social media network.
"From an online reputation point of view when you are trying to address issues you take them offline," he says. "I wonder whether Twitter is quite blatantly undermining its shame power. It doesn't address the emotional feel-good factor, the vindication a complainant feels when they get to flame a business on Twitter. It looks like Twitter is trading it in for commercial relevance."
However Goodridge says this isn't the way she looks at the changes.
"Customer service is a two-way interaction," she says. "We want to enable our users to do things a lot more easily."
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