Ian Hughes says he made a mistake when he consigned Twitter to the corporate rubbish bin.

When I am wrong, I am prepared to admit I am wrong. I was wrong once before and it might be that I am wrong again.

I recently wrote that I could see no commercial use for Twitter. And indeed, at that time, I could not.

That was until I came across Rebecca. And she made me change my mind.

Before I tell that story, let me tell you about a browser called Flock, it’s a sort of web browser but it does Social Networking properly. Using Flock, I can monitor what’s going on in the world and track it down. For sure, there are other systems that do the same, but I use Flock and I am happy. Rebecca uses Hootsuite.

Being an insurance junky, I have been looking at the way different companies in that sector are using the feed.  

One company clearly tells all their employees to retweet any announcement or news to all their colleagues and then pays a series of fictitious people (bots) to carry on the tweeting. For some random reason someone must have told them it was a good idea. 

Another seems to have a robot that seeks out the words ‘Car insurance’ and then checks the first name and location of the Tweeter. If they are in the UK one of three tweets is sent to them, making it look like they care about the Tweeter.

 I am not sure what the Twitter word for this is, possibly twivvel, or twap.

One of the things you learn from being in mass personalisation, is that it is what it is. It is not real personalisation, it’s a computer pretending to care. Let’s not try and make it bigger than it is.

And then there is Rebecca, and she is fab. The first thing you notice about Rebecca is that she is a real person. In fact her name is Rebecca Sibley and she works for Aviva, a large, yellow insurer. You can check her out on LinkedIn if you don’t believe me. On twitter you will find her at AvivaUKGI.

Saving the transaction 

The great thing about Rebecca is that she clearly looks out for people on Twitter who have issues and then, gently, sees what she can do to help. In fact, as I write these words, I am watching an interaction between her and a MissKittyLea. The original connection happened because another Tweeter recommended that MissKittyLea tweet Rebecca.  

 Within four minutes, of the initial tweet: ‘@AvivaUKGI horrendous customer service im looking forward to leaving you in april’ Rebecca Tweets back: ‘@misskittylea can i help at all? My email address is rebecca.sibley@aviva.co.uk, I work for Aviva. Becca’ and she proceeds to try to help. Another small thing she does; she tweets the person who recommended contacting her and thanks them for putting MissKittyLee in touch. Even though Kitty Lea is, in essence, complaining and that person has helped her complain.

And in five minutes, a transaction save has begun.

 Who knows whether she will win Kitty over, you will have to follow the feed. It looks like MissKittyLee might be a professional model/entertainer, so I am not sure she is covered under a traditional insurance policy anyway.

 If that’s the power of Twitter, if Rebecca can make a boring, yellow brand personal with just a little bit of work, then maybe, just maybe, there’s hope for humanity yet. And I think that’s at the heart of my observation – technology is great, people are better.  

There used to be a saying that on the Internet no-one knows you are a dog. You can’t beat the human nature of interaction and on Twitter people do actually know if you are a dog.

 The question here is can money be made from it, and that was central to my mistake. As a marketer, I am always trying to sell something . . . but what I should be thinking about is not what I can get but what I can keep. It seems to me that it is the issue of saving sales that will be the first possible outcome of working on social networking. Maybe the objective here is to connect. And only connect.

 Getting it right

We have a programme with one of the largest Internet blogs where they recommend us – every now and then we make mistakes and people get irritated with us and then blog about it. When that happens we react, in fact we try to over-react. We want to turn the situation around.  

 Sometimes it works. 

We rarely get thanked, but we learn a lot. Our customers tell us what we are getting wrong and, as a result, help us to get it right.

And that’s all the thanks I need.

Ian Hughes is managing director, Consumer Intelligence. Email: ianh@consumerintel.com   Twitter: ianchughes  Facebook: ianchughes   And on LinkedIn.