Recently, I’ve been pleasantly surprised at how responsive Plimus (@PlimusInc) people are on Twitter. I noticed something funny about their interface (which, btw, they have been tweaking and improving a lot lately – so this was obviously the result of some bug that hadn’t been fixed – nothing really serious affecting functionality). I tweeted about it – and bingo, they responded asking me whether the issue has been fixed for me yet. To me, this is a nice example of a company using Twitter the right way – i.e. to communicate with its customers as needed and just when needed – even for such small issues like that. I have also seen some affiliate networks doing a pretty nice job handling their Twitter presence.
On the other hand, I have bitched about Paypal a bunch of times – and never got any reply. Meanwhile, Paypal does have even a bunch of Twitter accounts – a separate one for each country plus a few for specialized services. Twitter marketing (or even, Twitter reputation management) gone wrong, indeed. Also, my post about Technorati on here which also got tweeted never had any reaction from Technorati folks – although it could be pretty damaging for them. For the record, Technorati also has a Twitter account.
All of this gave me an idea of an experiment. I’d like to analyze how responsive this kind of large online companies are on Twitter by tweeting different stuff they may be interested in reacting to. Surely I will be primarily targeting the companies I deal with directly – so I could use a little help from my readers. Please suggest who else I should probe – or even take part in this experiment and report your results. In a couple months, I will do a follow up post and analyze my findings.