...] Telstra Twitter discussion on Crikey [...

...] Tracking the success of a social media marketing campaign is not just measuring column inches, page impressions, returning visitors or call centre complaints, it’s about a slow shift in your customers attitudes over time. It’s about helping someone now, and then possibly not hearing from them again for 20 years. It’s most likely that you won’t know the real ROI of a social media campaign until you’re no longer working in the business. It’s one of the things that makes social media a hard sell, and on the flip side, it’s a reason why social media marketing companies all own some sort of proprietary software to rank influencers and reach – it appeases client’s marketing departments in the short term, but the true results will only ever be known over time. A long time. Smart companies who know the value of honest word of mouth know this and treat social media as a long term strategy. Dumb companies who are more concerned with defending territory than actively engaging their customers try and use it as a quick fix. [...

Cheers,

Mike

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