Kevin Smith vs. Southwest Airlines

February 15th, 2010 by admin under Customer Service, Newsworthy, Response, Social Media

So, a little more than two days after Director, Kevin Smith (@ThatKevinSmith) was ejected from a Southwest Airlines (@SouthwestAir) flight for being “Too Fat To Fly”, he gets the final word on his blog, My Boring-Ass Life. We here at Trustworthy have been following this case study in customer service gone wrong with great interest. Not [...]

Game-Changers

December 14th, 2009 by admin under Newsworthy, Predictions, Social Media

Two big things happened last week that will affect the way companies interact with their customers on the web.
1. Google launched real-time search, streaming tweets along with news above the normal results.
2. Facebook announced new privacy settings soon after striking deals with Google and Bing.
Both are game changers, but let’s start with Google’s real-time search [...]

We Got A New Freakin’ Website!

November 14th, 2009 by admin under About Trustworthy, Newsworthy, Social Media

The Founders of Trustworthy are proud to present our brand spankin’ new website. Like everything we do here, this was truly a team effort with Holly designing, Rob developing, Travis programming the blog feed and me writing all the copy.
This is our first swing at getting our message out in a full, version 1.0 presentation, [...]

Will Brand-Exploitation Scare Companies Away From Social Media?

October 11th, 2009 by admin under Customer Service, Newsworthy, Response, Social Media

Catching up on my feeds today, I read a Jennifer Leggio’s post, Does Social Media Reward Whining? which referenced Jeremiah Owyang’s Are Companies Teaching Customers To Yell At Their Friends? Both focused on the issue of customers taking advantage of companies who embrace social media.
I think it might be a good thing if the pendulum [...]

SXSWi 2010 Panel Picker

September 1st, 2009 by admin under About Trustworthy, Newsworthy, Response, Social Media

I wouldn’t be pimping for votes this hard if I didn’t believe this would truly be an exceptional panel. It’s called #youFAIL: Respond Or Die In Social Media, and I’m promising “No lofty platitudes, just in-the-trenches advice and actionable tips from people who do it every day.” Please vote now if you think this sounds [...]

SXSW Interview

Media Hacks Break Guitars

August 6th, 2009 by admin under Customer Service, Newsworthy, Response, Social Media

I wasn’t going to comment on the United Breaks Guitars fiasco because it hit the mainstream media so fast and United’s response seemed almost conventional. Almost predictable.
But listening to this week’s Media Hacks podcast made me realize what a great case study it is on multiple levels. Mitch, Julien, CC and Hugh were debating whether [...]

Hurry Up & Humanize Your Brand!

July 21st, 2009 by admin under Customer Service, Newsworthy, Response, Social Media

Smart brands know they can’t be afraid to speak freely without consultation and review. The lack of a timely response is nearly as damaging as no response at all. Human beings screw up. Brands screw up. Sometimes, it’s the most human thing you’ll see a brand do.
Gotta give some credit to Baja Fresh, the Mexican [...]

Social Media Response Hero of the Month

April 26th, 2009 by admin under Customer Service, Newsworthy, Response, Social Media

We got the reply above to our tweet about our co-founder, Holly Skodis, lodging a complaint about Paychex the way we all do these days: on Twitter. She was replied to by @PAYX within 24 hrs and the dialogue ended with Holly commending him for taking her issue seriously.
So here’s this guy, a Supervisor at [...]

Open Letter to Jeff Bezos

April 14th, 2009 by admin under Customer Service, Newsworthy, Response, Social Media

Dear Mr. Bezos,
All of us here at Trustworthy are huge fans of Amazon and regularly buy everything from flat-screens to shaving cream on Amazon.com. We get free shipping with Amazon Prime, and even harangue lazy authors via email to publish their works for the Kindle.
So it was with great lament that we witnessed the recent [...]