Thanks!

Firstly, a lot of people will believe this service will be used for spam, regardless of our intentions. As Aaron has pointed out, we would probably to need follow customers for the cases of people who use private tweets, which could end up with someone skimming the list of our followers for marketing purposes or the like.

The main time I can see it being useful would be for mass disruption notifications (a mass internal database of the twitter accounts and the customers location, allowing a tweets to all customers affected by particular outages). Unfortunately, giving information to customers regarding account activations and the like usually involves a task number (which the SMS messages and emails have). However with that number and the person’s full name and other details (often available on the twitter account), an unscrupulous watcher might use that information to commit identity theft by calling in and pretending to be someone else.

This could be counterracted by continuing the SMS/email services and use the Twitter account to provide very non-specific information (“tech is testing today”, “your broadband is active”) without the use of internal reference numbers. This would strongly define it as a supplemental means of contact, a point that would need to be drilled into customers early on.

Technicalities aside, I like the idea. I think it sounds pretty cool to be able to get in touch about basic issues without needing to call or have my details handy (not that I don’t have them memorized already :P). On a related note, can/is this able to be implemented for the netstatus faults? I can see the value of following something like @iinetstatwa and being tweeted in real time about any issues I might need to know.

iiNet presently has a dedicated social media team of four individuals (not including the multitude of employees that participate on their own time) – and we’re anticipating that number will rise over time by a considerable amount. Twitter activity directed at iiNet has been on the rise since we’ve started monitoring it closely, and this isn’t likely to change anytime soon.

We’re constantly kept in the loop when new campaigns are approaching, as we historically do see an explosion of activity on all social networks during that time.

I don’t see Social Media at iiNet as a short term thing – it’s a fixture of the business that will continue to grow and evolve as required.

Whirlpool is a fairly dedicated IT website, and whilst there are people on there that aren’t of the IT variety, it is mostly consisted of IT related people that fill the forums.

With Twitter, it is a social networking site, and whilst the option of having Twitter linked to your iiNet account seems like a good idea for status updates to customers, etc, if it is a 2-way street (i.e. customers also able to tweet iiNet), then because it is easier, and a larger social medium than Whirlpool, i could see iiNet being bombarded with useless tweets, especially if iiNet run a large marketing campaign – be it TV, website, or even the customer support centres.

iiNet would need to have some way of dealing with the tweets that really aren’t iiNet’s problem, or coverage of customer service.