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Created on Tuesday, 2 November 2010

Last week Greater Manchester police launched an interesting initiative on Twitter – they posted every call out and incident onto the social network so that anybody choosing to follow them could see what kind of work they were doing. The tweets ranged from the everyday “suspicious driving on m6” to the surprising “man seen with fridge ” to the alarming “young boy walking alone along the side of the motorway”. This week in the midst of the comprehensive spending review a number of councils are beginning to crowdsource ideas for which parts of their services to improve and change. @Leedscutswatch is an idea spawned by the guardian which focuses on the impact of the spending review on Leeds. People can tweet or email their view of the services as they change or suffer budget issues. The information is very local but interesting “building work axed at bromfield inclusive learning centre” or “building work axed at wetherby high school”. I am impressed by both these initiatives as from my limited experience of working in the public sector it can be tough to make bold decisions that could lead to criticism from your customers or end users.

There is a big and laudable push for transparency within government at the moment but with this comes all of the complexity about how you handle feedback, comments, complaints and suggestions. The police were widely congratulated for their day of tweeting but I am sure it led to many interesting internal discussions. In the commercial sector too, the speed and directness with which you can now reach any brand is changing customer relations forever. My boyfriend recently had a bad experience on BA and decided to tweet about it immediately – within a few hours the BA twitter team (or more likely one person somewhere in a tiny office) had responded and even retweeted what he had said. I feel sure that this was a quicker route to resolving his issue than the normal process and full marks to the airline for reacting.

The intimacy and directness of social networks are one of their great pleasures but I think that this opening up of data and the perceived breakdown of the barrier of authority is one of the most interesting phenomenons of the internet and  one that very few retailers have properly begun to exploit and explore. A quick survey of my own twitter followers led to some great examples of how customers felt better treated on the internet than more traditional customer service mechanisms. Perhaps no surprises that ISPs and telco’s were found to be more responsive than calling up to complain. This strikes me as very important -  your social media strategy is normally run by someone who really cares for the brand and the technology  or the channel whereas this is often not the case with outsourced call centres or the  more traditional routes with which customers interact. As @amtstevens said in her tweet to me "Argos over the phone were rude but Argos on Twitter were very polite and helpful." Other people cited @glassesdirect and @thameswater as very responsive.

Some retailers are prepared to be as bold as the Greater Manchester police and put themselves out there for comment, potential abuse and also the chance for improvement - but not many – it seems the US still leads the way with Starbucks, Bestbuy and zappos.com all doing creative things.  Here in the UK there is plenty of room for more innovation, I know for sure that if I was in charge of a retailer of any scale I would sit the person running my twitter feed right beside me.