'You can't do that with a one-eight-hundred number'
Twitter has turned out to be a useful tool for some small businesses coping with customer-service or public-relations crises.The social-media service -- where users send short "tweets" to followers who have signed up to receive the messages -- came in handy for Innovative Beverage Group Holdings Inc., whose drankbeverage.com site crashed last month after a surge in traffic following a segment on Fox News for the company's so-called relaxation beverage, which contains "calming" ingredients like valerian root and melatonin. News Corp. owns Fox News as well as The Wall Street Journal.
Innovative Beverage notified consumers on its Twitter feed that it was working to resolve the problem. The company also did a search on Twitter for mentions of the site crash, so it could respond with tweets describing its repair efforts.
Peter Bianchi, Innovative's chief executive, says the site's meltdown was devastating, since a small business rarely receives national TV coverage. But he says the 12-hour site crash didn't appear to have any lasting damage and online sales of the beverage peaked the following day to their highest level to date.
"Twitter gave us an up-to-the-minute ability to take what would normally be a crisis situation and make it just another event," says Mr. Bianchi. "You can't do that with a 1-800-number."
As of Monday, drankbeverage.com had more than 1,000 Twitter followers.
Wine critic Gary Vaynerchuk found Twitter helpful in responding to an attack on his web site.Twitter also helped wine critic Gary Vaynerchuk respond quickly after his company's Web site, Corkd.com, was hacked so that visitors were greeted with pornography.
While technicians plugged away at the problem, which took about eight hours to resolve, Mr. Vaynerchuk says he shot a video of himself apologizing to customers of the wine-review site. He then posted it on a video-hosting site and linked to the footage from Twitter, where he has nearly 900,000 followers.
Mr. Vaynerchuk, who owns New-York based Cork'd LLC, also tweeted apologies to about 65 people who tweeted about the incident. "Every person that mentioned Cork'd on Twitter got a message from me and a link to the video," he says.
Mr. Vaynerchuk says his Web site saw no drop in traffic during the days that followed. He also received about 75 emails from customers complimenting him on how he handled the matter.
Scott Townsend used Twitter to contact laundry-service customers in an ice storm.
To be sure, Twitter can also be the root of a problem for entrepreneurs. Virginia Lawrence, a director at Ballantines PR, a boutique agency in Los Angeles, monitors Twitter daily on behalf of several small businesses for tweets that could harm their reputations.
Recently, she says she found several criticizing a client that were from a former employee the firm had fired. The dismissed worker "was saying negative things about how the company was run, as if they were doing illegal things," she says. Ms. Lawrence notified the client, who then approached the terminated employee about the matter, and soon after the scurrilous tweets stopped.
Twitter can also be an effective way to get a message across to consumers in an emergency. When an ice storm struck the Bartlesville, Okla., area last winter, United Linen & Uniform Services notified customers about the status of their orders through Twitter in addition to its Web site. Scott Townsend, marketing director for the laundry service, says many consumers today will find information about a business on Twitter before anywhere else because it's where they hang out online. "You fish where the fish are," he says.
Mr. Townsend adds that while email was also an option, entering customers' addresses would have been tedious and time-consuming.
Entrepreneurs should bear in mind that Twitter is unlikely to be of help in dealing with a problem if it isn't used regularly otherwise, says Shel Israel, author of "Twitterville: How Businesses Can Thrive in the New Global Neighborhoods."
"If you just go to Twitter when you have a crisis, you will have no followers and no credibility," he says. "The key to using Twitter effectively is to build trust with people who are relevant to your business."
Steve Fusek, owner of Fusek's True Value LLC, a hardware store in Indianapolis, now has an employee dedicated to updating the shop's Twitter profile during business hours. Mr. Fusek says consumers expect to see frequent tweets and swift responses to customer-service inquiries they post.
"You can't just sign up and leave it. You have to have someone on it," he says. "If you're not legitimate, you'll be found out quickly."
