Proactively communicating incidents and outages on Twitter is an excellent use of the service. Handling individual contacts is a practice only marketing guys l

Proactively communicating incidents and outages on Twitter is an excellent use of the service. Handling individual contacts is a practice only marketing guys like I think. You can create temporary appearance of good service that way (if you are lucky), but not build a solid reputation for good service - you run into the problems others have pointed out below, selection bias, neglecting your more effective support channels etc. This looks like a company misunderstanding how to use social media to me - someone created a social media team and gave them free reign to "solve problems via social media". It reminds me of a time I attended a sales presentation of a CRM with the sales guy bragging how a company used their twitter contact routing to identify the guy as a top influencer (via Klout or something) and had the chairman of their multi-billion company call back some celebrity who was complaining about the service he received with about some standard problem he was having with their service (it was something very commoditized, broadband I think). The customer service guys attending the presentation didn't understand why they thought it was a good use of technology or time - that isnt the way to build customer trust, making sure the problem was fixed by the first guy the celebrity contacted is how you build trust.