To Bad-Mouth or Not To Bad-Mouth

Posted by Gabe on June 20, 2010 under Twitter | Read the First Comment

I love this quote from ex-President Bill Clinton: “If you’re good at bad-mouthing people then you can get a job on the radio.” Truer words have not been said. Now most people do not use Twitter as a platform to spread gossip or to inflame others. But can it be used to exact revenge on companies that have “wronged” you or given you bad service? Absolutely? Does it get results? Sometimes. Is it good practice? Depends on who you talk to.

As with my other posts, I am not shy about giving my opinion as to how it applies to me, and believe me I have one on this subject so here goes.

Regardless of my opinion on it I have done it. I bad-mouthed at least one company on Twitter.  I did it more than once (I think) but less than a handful of times. And it did produce results the one time I remember doing it. It was a printing company. I am a BIG believer in customer service. I was told by ths company that they were right and I was wrong and they would allow me to reorder if I paid them an additional 50% of their value plus shipping. (Plus I had to ship back the items in question at my own expense.) I felt it was their fault and that they should do better, so I tweeted about it calling out their Twitter ID. I didn’t really expect anything, especially from the way I was treated by them, but I somehow felt better by doing it. Well I was contacted within 24 hours by someone else in the company who ended up sending me a whole new order (corrected) for free without asking me to return anything.  Now that is service.  I was extremely happy with the result and continue to use them as a printing company.

But was that the right thing to do?  I’m not sure.  You may have even formed an opinion of me (rightly or wrongly) based on whet I described.  The bottom line is I do not like to see negative tweets on Twitter. Period.  That’s just my story and I’m sticking to it.  And if you do it a lot you will get unfollowed from me.  People have enough negativity in their lives without having to share yours.  There was another instance where I retweeted a colleague’s complaint about a company.   I knew who was tweeting it and he seemed justified.  Later I decided that wasn’t smart so I deleted my retweet.  He even asked me why I rescinded.  I told him I like keeping my tweets positive.

Some people see Twitter as a great “equalizer” where we can test the limits of customer service.  Companies that are good at it are constantly trolling for negative tweets against them so they can “right the ship”.  When they do it it shows great customer service.   No matter how good the company is there is bound to be a complaint against them sometime.  So I leave it to you to decide when (or if there) is a good time to get mad on Twitter.

Now as far as bad-mouthing other people to purposefully smear them, no matter what the circumstance, I highly recommend against it. Even if you are right it’s going to make you look bad and you have no way to predict the back lash it can create. I remember an instance where I was scheduled to appear on an internet talk show with a relatively famous Twitter personality. For some reason she called out the integrity of another of my colleagues, questioning his motives for his charitable efforts, hinting that he is in it for his own furtherance. The person she called out had many supporters, I being one of them. I thought that what she had done was totally uncalled for, but I stayed out of it to a degree. The accused person’s supporters came at the accuser with a vengeance. She spent the next few days backtracking and eventually apologizing. It was clear that she did it under pressure and not for the real reasons so people still came at her. It was truly ugly. I cancelled my appearance on her show partly out of respect for the accused and also partly because I didn’t want to be exposed to the “radiation” that now surrounded her. I can’t think of a good reason that people should bad-mouth each other on Twitter. Thankfully, this is the only incident I have seen and people on Twitter (at least the ones that I follow) are always respectful of others.