Now I Twitterstand, Thanks Etapestry!

I'm a believer. Never again will I underestimate the power of Twitter! Yesterday at my day job, I hit a wall with our online fundraising website, FirstGiving, that we're using for our fall event. I called our rep at FirstGiving to trouble shoot and was told that the problem was our donor database company. I was furious because this issue was the very reason that we are using FirstGiving this year. So, what did I do? I tweeted about it--just once. This is what I said:

"Etapestry has ruined my day and I will not forget this!!!!"

There were seven comments on Facebook about it (since my Twitter Updates my Facebook) and I thought that we would just deal with the problem internally. This morning, however, I had an e-mail and my co-worker who manages our Etapestry database had an e-mail and a voicemail. Someone from Etapestry saw the disgruntled tweet and tracked my work information down even though I tweeted from my personal account. That's impressive people.

My co-worker and I exchanged some e-mails and even had a little conference call with Etapestry today and pretty much figured out that FirstGiving had maybe not been completely honest with us. Very not cool FirstGiving. The customer service at Etapestry was excellent and it's really interesting because several of the comments I got both yesterday and today on Facebook were very positive about Etap and people were shocked that I was unhappy with them (which I was obviously wrong about).

I think that there are some great lessons in here:

1. Even the UGLIEST truth is better than a lie. Firstgiving has lost my trust and that's a very difficult thing to earn back once it's lost. I'm a very loyal customer typically and they had been great up to this point. I had suggested them to multiple non-profits and commended their excellent customer service, helpful website and convenience. None of that is as important to me as their honesty though so they may have lost a customer over it. In the end, we may find that FirstGiving didn't mislead us but someone did so is that worth it?

2. Twitter is a powerful tool, don't ignore it. If Etapestry had not made the commitment to monitor and respond to their social media, I would be sitting here tonight wondering why they make my life so difficult. Because my event also isn't for another two months, I probably would have continued to tweet about it until at least then if not longer and possibly influencing other people to have a negative opinion of them. Etapestry is also now aware of a pretty serious problem: their competitor is lying to their customers about them. Wouldn't you want to know that?

3. "It's about a conversation not campaigns anymore." That's something that Randy Elrod and Spence Smith said at the amazing LifeWorks 2.0 seminar I went to last week and this experience really brought that home for me. I actually ended up having a neat conversation with the representative from Etapestry through e-mail because he saw on my Twitter that we had a staff retreat this morning where we were discussing Strength Finder 2.0. How many times have you talked to a company's customer service representative about a great book you just read and shared what you learned about yourself from it? Yeah, things are changing out there. Are you stuck in the past or leading the way forward?

4. Always give them a chance. I don't really regret tweeting what I did because we would have never gotten to the bottom of this otherwise but I think I will be more cautious about getting both sides of the story from now on. In fact, I'm calling FirstGiving tomorrow to see what they say unless they also monitor their web presence and beat me to the punch. You always want to get all the information though before you make a final judgment.

Thank you Etapestry for the great lessons and also to Desiree for being in the middle of this with me. I'll admit, it was really cool to be in the middle of a situation created by social media.

What experience have you had that's been impacted by social media?