Cheeky Twitter campaign takes advantage of WebCentral email outage

An Australian software-as-a-service company has taken advantage of the WebCentral email outage by launching a Twitter campaign.

Cleartext, based in Sydney, sent out a tweet this morning offering a 20% discount on its services to former WebCentral customers, and claiming that it has had a 100% "uptime" record over the last 12 months.

David Banes, chief executive of Cleartext, says the company uses social media to play around with its customers and even gain potential clients.

"I'm sort of pushing the boundaries with our social networking to see where people start pushing back," he says.

"We've been in the social networking space for a while, but usually it's targeted elsewhere and I thought we'd have a bit of fun with some direct action with this tweet and see if it gains interest."

Banes says while the company joined the "Twitter revolution like everyone else", the firm is now using a internally-built content aggregator to constantly watch social media updates about competitors.

He argues the real-time nature of social media means businesses wanting to reply must be on the ball.

"You can respond to issues quickly with this method, and spot PR or sales opportunities. If you're waiting for Google to index your page it takes a couple of hours and you might miss the opportunity," he says.

"We've got business already using this mechanism and we've got leads and one conversion in the last month."

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written by David Banes, May 01, 2009

SmartCompany are on the ball here, calling us within minutes of our Twitter micro-campaign targeting WebCentral customers and posting this story promptly, very smart :)

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written by Campbell Corser, May 01, 2009

Reminded me of an article Chris Thomas wrote a few weeks back about how companies can use twitter to increase sales. http://www.smartcompany.com.au...itter.html

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written by David Banes, May 01, 2009

It's a shame Twitter ditched track via xmpp last May (a year ago!) it was a really nice feature, being able to track keywords. We've managed to pull back some of the functionality via TwitterSpy which is great.

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written by Brad Wehr, May 01, 2009

Not ready to jump ship yet but very annoyed with no communication from WC other than recorded phone msg - problem will be resolved "shortly". Over 24 hours later ultimately.

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written by Walter Adamson, May 29, 2009

This highlights why the discussions whether Social Media is a fad or why corporate executives don't see the opportunity are pretty much history. With the inception of reporting tools, methods to measure success and models and frameworks to articulate strategies - social media entered the board rooms. And pretty quickly social media became a competitive weapon.

Social Media Academy educates business managers and consultants in the strategy behind this social media competition.

http://www.socialmedia-academy.com/html/au-introwebinar.cfm

Walter Adamson
@g2m