Last week, on a particularly busy day of course,  COX had a meltdown. No internet for Margie! I grabbed my iPhone, jumped on twitter and searched “COX Phoenix” to see if it was just my service or if others were affected as well.  I wasn’t alone. There was a long stream of tweets from many (some nicer than others) and, to my surprise, there was @COXtech1 responding! They were calm, consistent and reassured all of us they were hard at work to resolve the issues and would keep us informed on twitter. They were listening!! Great use of twitter and social media during a difficult time.

The next day I sent out a tweet giving kudos to them. When we give a compliment we should expect nothing in return but we do. We expect someone to say “thank you” for acknowledging our good work. I heard nothing. My tweet was RT’d (retweet) by 2 well-known Arizona tweeple and still nothing. I can only assume COX was no longer listening.

As a business, I encourage you to listen daily and not just during a crisis. It’s very easy with the variety of tools available such as tweetdeck and hootsuite. COX had a golden opportunity to continue to build relationships with their customers. They could have used twitter to again apologize to those they had been in contact with and to also boast regarding how quickly they were able to resolve the situation.  Instead it was like a great dinner with a lousy dessert. Twitter is a fabulous PUBLIC RELATIONShip tool if used wisely.