For those of you who missed my earlier blog post, I discovered recently that my personal twitter account @tom8williams, had been suspended by Twitter without an explanation. I am happy to say that I was back in the twitterverse after several hours, but the event caused me to take pause and ponder the event. It really felt like someone reached in my pocket and stole my cell phone! I didn’t realize how much I depend on Twitter until it was taken away from me. (If you want to get the scoop on the Twitter Snafu that caused thousands of people like me to get suspended by accident, check out Mashable’s post here)
I wanted to give a SHOUT OUT to all my tweeps who retweeted my blog post yesterday and for those of you who were tweeting out the hashtag #freetom8williams. (that one cracked me up) The twitterlove was really coming on strong yesterday. I appreciate each and every one of you.
- #freetom8williams
One big Ah hah I got from the experience was the lack of real customer service. Twitter kind of sends you on a wild goose chase looking for an illusive form, which I never did locate. At one point I wound up subscribing to a 3rd party help-desk website! As I’m loading up my profile image on their network like some kind of social media robot, I thought to myself… “What the crap am I doing? I just need my twitter service restored!”
I then tried to email Twitter customer service. I got back an automated response that told me I probably violated their terms (which I did not) and then requested that I review the terms…again. If after my review I STILL thought I had been suspended accidentally I should send ANOTHER email to them saying that.
EPIPHANY…
After fuming a bit at the lack of customer service, I was reminded of something. I dont’ pay for Twitter! It’s basically free. So should I expect good customer service? No. Should I expect Twitter to care whether or not I stay or leave? No. Can I threaten to terminate my Twitter service or force them to take better care of me? No.
In the last several years, we have fallen in love with the notion of Free. YouTube is free, Hulu is free, Flickr, Photobucket, Sharethis, Blog tools, Twitter, IM, Email, Storage… FREE FREE FREE. We have almost come to expect that everything should be Free. However, when you have a problem, need help, depend heavily on a service…Free may not be the best way to fly…
Note to Twitter…I know you guys are burning insane amounts of cash and probably have no idea how to make money off your product. How about Twitter Premium with a few special features and some decent customer service for say… $5.00/mo? 5MM subscribers = $25MM. I think you could hire a few people to answer the phones for that kind of money.
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