We have all read articles on how social media can be used to real advantage by companies. But there are plenty of opportunities for it to backfire too.
Last week MacDonalds launched a Twitter campaign #McDstories which invited, one assumes, ‘feel good’ stories about its hamburgers. What it got was a mountain of hate tweets ranging from stories of e-coli to vermin. The hashtag was quickly pulled – but not before the story hit every newspaper in the world.
Monday and Tuesday were rather ‘bad hair days’ here at TechMarketView. MailChimp, the US company that sends out our emails (and millions of others for the world’s leading companies), had several outages. We had to resort to a manual send. Mailchimp has been a totally reliable service for several years. We can all forgive – once.
As in Blackberry last year, the problem was that there was no news of this outage on MailChimp’s website for some time. Eventually they put out a Tweet. I am now told that this is their channel for communicating service status. Had I known, I might have signed up to follow them before…
After signing up, the very first message I received – whilst Mailchimp still wasn’t working – was an interview about Designing with Emotion by Aarron Walter, Lead User Experience Designer at MailChimp. My reaction, rather understandably I thought, was to fire back with a rather annoyed comment about why he was wasting his time on this rather than trying to improve the user experience for their customers whose emails weren’t being sent. Which was quite possibly then read by 46,000 other Mailchimp users.
Mailchimp responded “Richard, first and foremost, we understand your frustrations. Outages and downtime are no fun for you or for us. But MailChimp is a web-based application, and as such, sometimes there are technical issues that arise and make things unpleasant for our users.”
This made me even more annoyed.
The point of all of this is that a simple Service Status update would not have caused me to ‘go public’. But their use of Twitter and Facebook during this period actually made it even more unpleasant for at least one Mailchimp user.