Current Mood: Surprised

You’ve seen it. Maybe you do it. Using social media to promote your business. It’s a great tool if used properly. You can get to know your potential client base and interact with them. You can let them know what you really have to offer. However, because everyone is a potential client and/or referral, you really must be careful in how you present yourself to this new customer base. Let me bring forth an example:

A fellow St. Louisan vegan was commenting on the fact that there’s a pizza place in St. Louis that offers vegan cheese. Cool stuff! I get pretty excited about companies that consider the fact that some people have different dietary needs than others. I also like to pass on the good news to my friends. Not only are there vegans hungry for pizza, but also lactose intolerant people, or even people just looking to cut out some dietary fat. So I check the company’s profile, and I see this:

Bio RFT’s Best Pizza in St. Louis. Barack Obama’s Favorite Pizza

I find companies who claim endorsement by someone famous to be ridiculous, because they appear to be riding someone else’s fame to promote themselves. Perhaps I could subtitle my blog “Al Gore’s favorite blog.” Because, you know, he invented the Internet. So I made comment to my vegan Twitter friend about this:

So I get a reply from their company. Now bear in mind, depending on people’s settings, they will only see this if they follow both me and this company, or potentially not at all.

Here I start to think… Is this for real? Are they honestly saying this to a potential customer? Obviously they have looked at my profile to see that I am on Second Life, so they would also see that I am vegan, thus someone that would be a consumer for the more expensive specialty meat and cheese alternatives. And it looks pretty derogatory to me, stating “Why don’t you just go on back to your virtual world.” How rude. This is their social media face. This is my first impression of this company, the first contact that they have ever had with me.

So, since this was a message TO @pistl, I made my statement of my first impression of this company:

The #vegan tag makes @hashvegan retweet it to other people that follow it, and the #stl tag is searchable for other St. Louisans to see. And yes, as you can see here, I was a bit offended by this company. I then got a confusing response:

This would have been the perfect time to turn a negative into a positive.

“Oh I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to appear to be so rude!”

Instead I get a very confusing response that really makes no sense. Who’s wishing failure and job loss? Are we starting to consider the capacity of the Internet and word of mouth? Wait, isn’t that why we’re using social media?

Apparently they have another fan:

To keep further discussion out of the public timeline, I got a direct message from @veganwrites, who was also shocked by this. She had originally started this discussion by asking about their animal-free products. So I respond:

Adding to the insult, rather than still trying to turn that negative into a positive, I get an even more hateful response:

Who wished anyone failure? At no point did I ever wish this, or any other, business to fail. I made a statement that they should probably step up their social networking and not be rude to potential customers. And you know what else? They post their tweets to their website for any potential customer who is looking at their site to see:

Click for full image and check the lower right.

The irresponsibility is solely upon the person responsible for managing this company’s social media face. If you want to have a successful relationship with your potential customers, you must be the epitome of customer service. Your first impression may also be your last.