Where do you draw the line with CRM?

It’s quite easy to forget, well for me at least, that unless you specifically protect your feed, all of our tweets can be seen by anybody. When I tap away I imagine my wit and bad spelling to be only enjoyed by a handful of friends or associates.

This of course isn’t the case and organisations have cottoned on to the fact that they can glean a valuable insight in to what their customers and users think about their products and services through social media. Last week, whilst very frustrated at filling in time-sheets on my current employers ‘glitchy’ to put it likely software, I tweeted something along the lines of “I dread to think how much money people waste on shoddy systems and software. I’m looking at you ******” (I not going to name the company, again).

Within an hour one of their competitors had replied to my tweet, nothing derogatory, just a gentle invitation to possibly try their product. I have to admit I was impressed and if I was in any way responsible for the decision about such systems I may have tried to do something about it. Over the next 48 hours the unnamed supplier along with another of their competitors had replied via twitter and it began to get a bit silly.

Mostly because the unnamed supplier had made quite a grand statement about their product, which was completely disillusioned. And for the time that’s where it was left.

Until a few days later one of my colleagues told me how she’d heard about my tweet and that she’d been emailed by our unnamed, very worried supplier. To do this they must have had to do a little bit of digging to find out where I worked, then written an email to their contact subtly probing to see if they were going to lose an obviously valued customer.

I was a bit stunned by the lengths they’d already gone to. Firstly I do think it’s amazing that organisations are being proactive like this, using social media as part of their customer relationship model, but then I felt, as stupid as this sounds, a little preyed upon. The irony is that if they put the same tenacity into sorting out their product, I wouldn’t have tweeted in the first place. And there I was me thinking it was only @PSJF, @ViciousCraig and the robots that read my tweets.