"...Someone monitoring the @awscloud account opened a trouble ticket to my email address asking for clarification" support through twitter is going mainstream. It is like praying loud ad getting a response.
1.) AWS staff doing something is the very definition of not mainstream when it comes to stuff like Twitter, their customers are developers
2.) AWS have always been awesome at responding to customer feedback in my experience
3.) But you're right, except change "is going" to "has gone". A friend of mine who works in SEO and social media (the good kind) says "In 2009 companies needed to have social media accounts, in 2010 they needed to put out content on them, in 2011 they needed to respond to customers through them" and he's right. The mentality of customers of Twitter/Facebook has, for the most part, moved from "holy hell, a company ACTUALLY SAW MY TWEET?" to "I tweeted about my problem an hour ago, where the fuck is my answer?".
"I tweeted about my problem an hour ago, where the fuck is my answer?".
Can anybody else verify this? To me, it seems ridiculous that anybody would expect to get support by posting something to a random website. Personally, I go to twitter.com about four times a year and type in the names of my products to do a quick vanity search about what people are saying about them. I've never seen anything like a support request (or even a complete coherent thought) in there. It just doesn't seem like something worth monitoring.
My product sites all have a contact page with an email address on it. If you want to contact me, that's how you do it.
Amazon has forums with dedicated representatives monitoring them. That's how you get in touch with them. I've never gone more than a few hours without a response from somebody who knows what they're talking about in there.
Sorry I should have been more clear, it's not that people will tweet "I have X, Y, Z problems with product" it's that they will tweet "@company Help me I have this problem".
This is basically because plenty of companies are doing this (see https://twitter.com/#!/vodafoneuk for example), so people get used to it.
So really it's not so much posting to a random website, it's more using social media as a means to contact them.
But based on the trend, people have come to expect it as the norm thanks to companies that lead the way in doing it, and now those compares are leading the way in proactively reaching out to customers who tweet not directly at them - for example 9 months ago I tweeted something like "As soon as my contract with Vodafone ends I'm moving to Orange", both companies tweeted at me offering to help - so people could well come to expect that as the norm too.
I certainly get tweets in this vein for my app @expandrive and storage service @strongspace. Especially if something is effecting availability.
Lots of users realize that there is likely a faster response from twitter than support@whatever.com because the developer has some amount of face at stake with the dirty laundry in public.
But it's not really "in public" though, is it? I mean really, how many people would you expect to go to search.twitter.com and type in "expandrive" in the twelve or so hours that they cache that post? That's the only way anybody would know that your dirty laundry was airing, and then only if they could parse what the airer was trying to say.
If you really wanted to "expose" something in public, you'd put it up on a blog or someplace that's actually on the public facing internet. Not that it would get you any more chance of the company hearing about it, but at least other people might see it.
And, of course, if you run a company that simply doesn't respond to things on Twitter, the customer in question will hopefully learn that they can send you an email and get a fast response.
