Fanatical Brand Protection on Twitter

With Twitter being the new darling of the blogosphere there’s plenty of talk about how to promote your brand and business on there.

What there’s less talk about is how to use it to protect your brand. Here’s a great example from a big company.

A Little bit of Background
We recently moved all of our hosting infrastructure to Rackspace. With the ridiculously high levels of growth we’ve had with our online accounting software, I wanted to be sure we could scale up the hardware very quickly if we needed to. Rackspace were the obvious choice.

The level of service we’d received from Rackspace was OK. It wasn’t great, but it wasn’t poor. From a company that has trademarked the term “Fanatical Support” I did expect sonewhat more than I’d been receiving.

Back to Twitter
Now a lot of the posts (or ‘tweets’) on Twitter are just random thoughts as opposed to carefully crafted marketing messages. At least what I post anyway. This can lead to “brain leaks” where you get an insight into what is on someones mind from their tweet. On Tuesday, I posted “rackspace change my account manager as frequently as my bank. Fanatical?”.

Shortly after I get a message on twitter from one of Rackspaces Vice Presidents in the US saying “@DuaneJackson Many apologies for those AM changes Duane. Want to improve there and I am interested in your feedback. fmendler @ rackspace”

So I dropped the guy an email. He then put me in touch with the Operations Director for EMEA who called me, outside of office hours to have a chat. It turns out they’d started off badly on managing my account which is why I wasn’t left with the warm feeling they like to make sure most of their customer are left with.

I’ve now had a good chat with my account manager, have a better understanding of what Rackspace can do for me and am a much, much happier bunny.

So Rackspace now have a very happy customer and a positive blog posting, rather than (potentially) one slagging them off. All because my brain leaked onto Twitter, and Rackspace were sensible enough to be monitoring mentions of their name.