This is far from the first story about Twitter and its third-party search tools (Tweetscan, Summize, etc.) being used to create an incredibly positive PR moment, but since it involves one of my favorite bloggers and one of my favorite startups, I thought I’d make mention of it and hopefully drive home a few points about how easy it is to generate positive buzz by proactively using such services.
This story starts with a Tweet from Louis Gray (aka, Scoble’s favorite blogger) on Friday night. Gray describes the challenge he is facing in getting Disqus, a third-party commenting system, up-and-running on his blog:
[img src="http://i32.tinypic.com/spc96o.gif" caption="" credit="" alt=""]
An hour and change later, Daniel Ha, co-founder of Disqus, is on the case, replying to Gray:
[img src="http://i30.tinypic.com/33561wg.gif" caption="" credit="" alt="ha"]
Long story short, by Saturday, Louis Gray’s blog had Disqus comments integrated, and the blogger was so happy about the interaction that he blogged about it, praising Ha and his team.
For some more details on how the situation played out, read Gray’s post, but here’s how Disqus and lots of other companies large and small are able to pull off such great moments in brand building, in less than 24 hours:
1. Use a Twitter search service to see when anyone mentions your brand name, a product name, or the name of one of your employees. Tweetscan is best known here, though I’ve recently switched to Summize, which offers a few more features.
2. If you use an RSS reader, both Tweetscan and Summize let you subscribe to any keyword and get alerts whenever a new Tweet appears. This takes a few minutes longer to get to you than constantly refreshing your search, but should be sufficient for all but the most obsessive compulsive brand managers.
3. Reply to people talking about your brand, even if there is no immediate solution.
Of course, not every tweet about your brand will be an opportunity to create positive buzz – had Gray asked for Disqus to build new features x, y, and z, Ha probably would have said “good ideas, they’re in the works.” However, often times there are opportunities to quickly fix something for someone, which can lead to at a minimum 1 very happy customer, and at a maximum a ringing public endorsement.
We actually just experienced something similar at Mashable on Thursday. Nick O’Neill from Social Times pointed out that we used the same exact headline as him on a story about Twitter (how fitting) – an embarrassing but unavoidable mistake that happens once and a while when you’re reading hundreds of feeds and working at a breakneck pace. In any event, within minutes we had the situation fixed, and Nick told us how awesome we are. Thanks Nick ;-)