Yesterday, Melbourne blogger Michael Specht posted a comprehensive overview of this controversy in Australian social media. He reckons it is a great example of how a corporation shouldn’t do social media. In particular, he thinks Telstra’s approach looks too much like trying to use old media approaches in a new media setting.
A few days ago, Telstra’s Mike Hickinbotham provided a comprehensive defence of Telstra’s twitter strategy, which he says is about providing tech support to customers. In his piece, Hickinbotham addresses the spam issue:
One angle not discussed in the online commentary is using Twitter under Australia’s 2003 Spam Act (www.dbcde.gov.au).
Since the early stages of development, BigPond’s primary concern has been protecting the customer’s privacy. We want to ensure that our communications to customers are not commercial electronic messages.
Sending commercial electronic messages without the customer’s consent would amount to a violation under the Spam Act.
Since Twitter was introduced post 2003 and we are the first cab off the rank, a cautious approach, limiting the potential risk is considered the best approach. When a customer responds to our introductory message, we have more flexibility to use a conversational tone.
Simon Sharwood has also taken up the twitter spam issue on his podcast, released yesterday:
This week’s first feature interview on Smart Call is with Brady Jacobsen, BigPond’s Director of Customer Operations. Brady explains that the company’s foray into Twitter., a micro-blogging service, has resulted in unprecedented levels of feedback from customers about how it can deliver customer service more effectively online.
This issue probably has a long way to run; especially if a lot of other companies start following Telsta’s example. I already have real doubts about twitter’s scalability. That is, the flow of tweets quickly becomes so great that it is like watching a film going at ten times the intended speed – you get little glimpses of things happening but you can’t really make head or tail of it. Twitter is like life lived without recourse to a narrative.
5 Comments
Hi Trevor,
For the record Telstra has not been accused of spam.
Although I appreciate you have linked to my orginal NWAT blog, I want to re-state what I posted in my blog because I think it’s important to the discussion about spam:
“Since the early stages of development, BigPond’s primary concern has been protecting the customer’s privacy. We want to ensure that our communications to customers are not commercial electronic messages.
Sending commercial electronic messages without the customer’s consent would amount to a violation under the Spam Act.
Since Twitter was introduced post 2003 and we are the first cab off the rank, a cautious approach, limiting the potential risk is considered the best approach. When a customer responds to our introductory message, we have more flexibility to use a conversational tone.”
Looking after the best interests of the customer is why we provided a Twitter service and why we took a cautious approach. In my opinion, that’s the heart of the issue.
I think the debate around ‘how’ a corporation reaches out to customers using social media is very important. Particularly if there is going to be greater corporate adoption of social media in Australia.
Regards,
Mike Hickinbotham
http://www.nowwearetalking.com.au/blogs/the-scrum/listen–evolve-insights-from-launching-bigpond-twitter
Hi Mike – fair enough. I’ve taken ‘accused’ out of the heading. The issue of spam and social media is key here rather than just Telstra
Thanks Trevor. Greatly appreciate it.
Cheers,
Mike