One of the not so new Twitter spamming techniques is to add a Twitter username before your worthless message. So instead of “Check out X website”, we have “@username Check out X website”. Of course, X website can be easily replaced with whatever service, product or job offering. Apply the same technique for hundreds and hundreds of users from your spammy Twitter account that follows no one and has a couple of followers and maybe some of the people you reach are actually interested and will click your link.

While this might work in some accidental cases, it will take quite the same amount of time to search for people actually interested in what you’re selling and send them the replies. If you can do that after following and getting to know them, even better. Of course, your Twitter account should be about more than @replies to those you follow, but that’s another side of the story. Continue reading

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People have the habit of complaining about products and services online. When the complaints are relevant and an apology is needed, company representatives often post them on the blog where the initial problem was revealed. While some are great and solve the problem while both gaining the support and admiration of the blogger in question, others fail. After looking into a few of these apologies and trying to understand where people most commonly go wrong, I have rediscovered the art of writing effective replies to people’s problems.

But before I start, if you’re wondering why you should apologize in the first place, it’s because news travels fast online, if the problem is significant, there are great chances more people will complain and all that negativity will pop up when potential customers look you up online. You shouldn’t apologize for nonsense and give credibility to shady bloggers and nonexistant issues, but when the problem is real, you need to solve it, apologize for the inconvenience and let people know it has all been taken care of.

Here are a few tips for writing apologies that will help your company and not worsen the situation instead:

1. Recognize the problem and give it due consideration

Some apologies fail because while they say the “I’m sorry”, they fail to focus on the problem and the discomfort experienced by the customer. Instead, they rush through the apology and the unpleasant situation and focus on what the customer should have done, the proper channels to report the problem and how they can solve future problems. This is all wrong because if you’re replying, it’s clear the online piece of posting has reached its goal of making the issue known. Writing an apology that says this is not the right way and you won’t do much about it makes you look bad! Continue reading

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