If You Complain To A Company On Twitter, It Probably Doesn't Care Enough To Answer You

Nobody likes to be ignored, but that's exactly what happens to most people when they complain to companies on Twitter.

71% of people never get a response from companies that they bother with their woes on Twitter, according to a recent study by Maritz Research and evolve24.

And of the 29% that did, they approved of the effort. 83.5% said that they either liked or loved getting a response from the company.

What brands do on Twitter makes an impact. Perhaps it's impossible with the amount of resources most companies put towards social media to respond to every single complaint, but to have the vast majority go completely unanswered isn't acceptable. Many brands have devoted customer service Twitter accounts, and there's just no excuse for not answering on those.

The point of a company being on Twitter should be to communicate with its customers. That's a two-way street. Brands that go on Twitter just to be a loudspeaker to promote themselves aren't accomplishing much -- they're just making their customers feel like they don't matter.

Here's a chart of some of Maritz and evolve24's findings:

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Here's Everything I Wish I'd Known When I Started My Company At 16

Here's Everything I Wish I'd Known When I Started My Company At 16 Login With Facebook | Login With Twitter | Login | Register War Room Contributors Home Tech Entertainment Wall Street Markets Strategy Sports Lifestyle Politics EuropeData Misc. Your Money Video Latest Your News War Room Home Management Hiring & Firing Founders' Corner Instant MBA Document Center HiveTapePRContributors Follow us on Facebook and get updates from War Room Contributors posted directly to your news feed 

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Email Zip Here's Everything I Wish I'd Known When I Started My Company At 16 Vanessa Van Petten, Young Entrepreneur Council | Sep. 24, 2011, 9:36 AM | 118 | A A A   xEmail Article From To Email Sent!You have successfully emailed the post.

Vanessa Van Petten URL Vanessa Van Petten is the CEO and author of Science of People.

Recent PostsThe Scientifically-Proven Method For Getting People To Say "Yes" How The Founders of College Hunks Hauling Junk Overcame the Inexperience Barrier How to Make the Perfect Pitch How to Diffuse an Angry Customer I started my company as a naive 16-year-old. There are so many things I wish I had known.

Stray From the Plan

When I started RadicalParenting.com I was constantly told, "Stick to your big goal" or "Full speed ahead." Having an end goal is great, but I didn't realize that being flexible and being open to unexpected; opportunities were equally important. For example, as a writer, I wanted to offer books and blog posts to our audience. I was given the opportunity to do webinars and decided to give it a shot, even though it wasn't in the plan. The webinars turned out to be hugely successful and taught me that video as well as articles are the a powerful combination. Having a plan is great, but being willing to changing directions when new opportunities arise can really help boost your business.

Offer Before You Ask

As a newbie to networking, my approach was all wrong. I went to conferences with a sack full of business cards and asked everyone what they could do for me. I quickly learned that I even though I was meeting people, there was nothing substantial about our interactions. We would trade emails and then never converse again or my blunt ask would turn them off. After a few failed conferences, I learned that if I found out as much as I could about their business I could target the specific ways we could help each other. So, when you go to a conference find out their business and then think of ways that you can both leverage each others audiences, specialties or connections. Not only will they remember you, but your business will benefit as well.

Keep It Simple

Starting a company is not as hard as maintaining a company. The first few steps of starting my company like building the website, getting incorporated and writing my business plan were challenging. However, I believed everything would get easier from there -- boy was I wrong. Once I built our website I realized I had to maintain it, add content to it and optimize it if anyone other than my parents were going to find it. Keeping the business growing as a harder challenge than I thought. I wish I had known that making company processes, products and systems simple from the start would make running the company less expensive and complicated later. If you are starting a company or a new project think about both how to do it and how to maintain it.

Vanessa Van Petten specializes in social and emotional intelligence research and development. The focus of her company, The Science of People, is to research youth behavior and help adults keep up with young adults. 

The Young Entrepreneur Council (Y.E.C.) is an invite-only nonprofit organization comprised of the country's most promising young entrepreneurs. The Y.E.C promotes entrepreneurship as a solution to youth unemployment and underemployment and provides its members with access to tools, mentorship, and resources that support each stage of a business's development and growth.

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LEAKED MEMO: Jerry Yang Tells Yahoos The Company Is For Sale (YHOO)

After Yahoo fired CEO Carol Bartz, cofounder Jerry Yang told employees that the company had not begun a sales process.

Since then, reports here and elsewhere have suggested that is a bunch of malarkey and that Yahoo's board is very much putting the company up for sale.

Today, Yang copped to as much in a company-wide memo.

In it he says that Yahoo has hired investment bank Allen & Company to help it field "inquiries from multiple parties that have already expressed interest in a number of potential options."

The memo:

Dear Yahoos:

In our recent all hands meeting, we talked about the Board’s strategic review to help return the Company to a path of robust growth and industry-leading innovation. While our teams are working to evaluate the many opportunities by which Yahoo! can continue building on our success, all kinds of people have been – and will continue – speculating in the media about where that work is headed, so we thought it best to provide you with some additional context directly from those of us who are closest to it.  We don’t have specific news to share with you today, but we are committed to communicating with you directly from time to time – especially given the level of external swirl – so that you know where we are in the process. You can expect periodic updates from us and we encourage you to communicate with us as well.

At the heart of what we are doing is our belief that Yahoo!’s core strengths are not only relevant to where users are going today, but can serve as a foundation for the next phase of our company’s growth. Consider our strengths: we have 680 million users worldwide. We have nine of the #1 properties in the U.S., and we are a leader in display advertising. Our brand is iconic – we are not the only ones who bleed purple. By whatever measure you want to use – engagement, quality of products and services, our value to our advertisers – we all feel that we have what it takes to succeed. Also, our Asia assets remain one of our top priorities and we continue to work well with the teams there. As you may have seen, Alibaba Group has just announced a liquidity event for its employees that reflects a continued appreciation in its value, and therefore of the value of our stake.

What Yahoo! needs to do better – and we’ve talked about this – is accelerate innovation, reignite inspiration, and give our users what they want now – great content that is engaging and easy-to-use on any device and provides an experience in which they can participate and contribute. Perhaps most importantly, we need to anticipate what they will want next. That is the path to enhancing the value of Yahoo! for all of its stakeholders, including its users, customers, shareholders, partners and Yahoos everywhere. Our strategic review is designed to help us map out the best way to achieve that.

At this point, we cannot offer many specifics about the Board’s review; we’ve just gotten started. You should know that the entire Board and management team are fully aligned and unanimous in their views regarding the scope of this work. Allen & Company was a logical choice to help us in this review, because they have been one of our advisers for some time, and this is familiar territory for them. Achieving success in our sector is intrinsic to what they do for a living, and they will be constructive partners.

Our advisers are working with us to develop ideas that we will pursue proactively.  At the same time, they are fielding inquiries from multiple parties that have already expressed interest in a number of potential options. We will take the time we need to select and structure the best approach for the company, its shareholders and employees.

In addition, as we announced previously, the Board has commenced a search for a permanent Chief Executive Officer. That process also continues.

When we have updates that we can share we will do so. There will be plenty of rumors and speculation as different parties try to advance their agendas in the media – but it is important that we not be distracted by the rumors and speculation.

You are instrumental to the success of our business – we can’t do it without you. While we will move with a sense of urgency, this process will take time. Months, not weeks. We know that’s a lot of potential distraction, but we believe it will be worth the wait. We are forging a path to a next phase of growth for Yahoo! that feels like our best days: fun, full of possibility, and always in search of how to deliver the new thing people want from us. Together, we can write the next great chapter in the Yahoo! story and secure our place as one of those rarities: an internet company that endures.

Jerry                           Roy                         David

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How Former Campbell's Soup Company CEO Doug Conant Pulled The Brand Out From A "Circle Of Doom"

It was 2001 when Doug Conant became CEO of the Campbell Soup Company—he was just the eleventh man to hold the title in the company's 132-year history. He inherited a legendary American company, but one shadowed at the time by thick clouds of gloom; Campell's had lost half of its market value in the previous year. Even the headquarters' appearance reflected this dismal atmosphere, right down to the rusty barbed wire fencing that traced the grounds' perimeter. As Conant recalls, one employee said to him: "This place looks like a high-security prison." Conant knew he'd have to reinvent the company at nearly each level. This involved changing everything from how the V8 vegetable drink tasted to creating more functional display shelving. For eight straight years, Campbell's sales grew—until hitting a wall last year. Inc.com's Abram Brown spoke with Conant, who stepped down as CEO in July, but still regularly heats up cans of his favorite soup (chicken and sausage gumbo).

You say Campbell's was in a "circle of doom" when you arrived. What was your first step?
I had to get the culture back on track, because my observation has been, is, and always will be, that you can't have an organization that consistently delivers innovation unless you have a high level of engagement and a high level of trust. People just won't take risks. And we had an incredibly low-trust culture based on what had happened. To get there, we recognized that we had to change the leadership profile of the company, and we turned over, in the first three years, 300 of the top 350 leaders of the organization—which is to my knowledge unprecedented in the consumer-products industry. Of the 300 people we turned over, 150 people were promoted from within, and 150 were hired from outside: people who were high-character, high-quality.

So the takeaway: Don't be afraid to replace your leadership. Then what happened with the actual products?
People didn't think of soup. It was sitting in the pantry, and people weren’t thinking of having it. So what we discovered was that to restore consumer spending, and remind people that soup was a good alternative, people needed to consume more of it out of their pantry. Prior to that, they'd only think about it when there was a snowstorm. You know, "It's cold out. I'll have soup." You didn't think of it otherwise. We instituted an advertising campaign that's evolved over the decade and restored consumer spending.

Advertising gets people into the store, but what about when they're shopping?
People had a lot of trouble finding the products they wanted at retail because all the soup cans looked alike. So we created something—a special display piece—called "gravity-feed shelving" where the products were more clearly labeled and where they actually rolled down and were served to the consumer in a much more intelligent way, and so people could actually find the brands they were looking for.

Hard to believe that soup cans have looked the same for decades. Few companies go that long without some product update.
It's amazing to think that the microwave was invented in 1947, and it took us over 50 years for us to figure out that we can have microwavable soups. So we created an entire microwave platform with a "soup-at-hand" platform and microwaveable bowls, which began to make soup more approachable for the millennial and Gen-X generations, who weren't into counter-top cooking.

So with fresh leaders and newly redesigned products, did you move toward new markets?
We made V8 the No. 1 vegetable-juice brand in the world, and the big innovation there was recognizing that over half the population didn't like the taste of V8. So we innovated with a fruit and vegetable combination called V8 V-Fusion.

How did you try and make the culture of innovation permanent?
We created a balanced-scorecard mechanism for the entire organization to work off that was linked to their performance-evaluation plan and their bonus plan, which made sure the organization was aligned and focused on the appropriate organizational activities. So we reinvented our score-carding in the organization.

There was a lot of management turnover and a lot of downsizing, and the work environment had become a little dysfunctional and chaotic. We just had to come back in and bring some structure to it, get the right people in place, and get it back on its feet. It wasn’t’ rocket science. It was just a response to a difficult period in the company’s period.

Any new training initiatives?
Training changed in that we started to develop a circulum that focused on what I would call: functional excellence, and that is we have specific training in it, in manufacturing, in advertising—in every area of the company to help them become more functional. We also have leadership training. In the early days, we built a Campbell's leadership model. And we knew made those leadership [ideas] crystal clear. We evaluated the staff every year on the what and how. The what might be delivering Campbell microwavable soup on time and on budget. The how would be, Did you deliver in the spirit of the Campell Leadership Modell.

With Campbell's now experiencing a decline, what should new CEO Denise Morrison focus on?
I don't want to speak for her.  … [But] she has presented to the analyst community and said we need more spirited innovations. She's put more resources targeted to innovation. But she hasn’t necessarily identified the [exact] areas [she'll put the resources toward.]

Granted you can always crack open a can of chicken-and-sausage-gumbo if you get too nostalgic, but do you wish you were still there to help with these recent troubles?
I loved the whole time I was there, but it's somebody else's turn now. I'll move on to new adventures.

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Twitter Wants To Be (And Will Be) The Next Big Media Company

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Yesterday Twitter announced some big numbers. The important ones:

100 million active users (i.e. who log in once a month), and 50 million daily logged in users.40% of active users don't tweet.Twitter is focused on advertising as its business model. They do data licensing deals and the like, but they're focused on advertising as their huge business.

What this all works out to: Twitter wants to be (and will be) the next big media company.

Twitter is basically TV at this point: unlike social networks, most people are here to follow brands, entertainers and events they like, not interact with their friends (although they also do that, but it increasingly seems to be secondary), and will increasingly do so with commercial interruption. 

Is that vision realistic? In a word, yes. 

For a few reasons:

Twitter won't stop growing. Twitter had 400 million unique visitors to just Twitter.com last month. Twitter active users are up 80% from the beginning of the year which, given how big Twitter already is, is astounding. It seems that Twitter is both adding new users and making existing users more active. Given Twitter's network effect, there is no reason to believe that growth won't continue.Twitter is an amazing broadcast medium. The power of live, microchunked content is amazing. As we saw during events like the death of Osama Bin Laden, Twitter is often both the fastest and most entertaining and interesting way to follow live events. People can follow exactly the people and brands they're interested in. To anyone with a phone, Twitter is your world in your pocket.   

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French Startup Media Company FrenchWeb Raises Almost $1 Million From French Entrepreneurs

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FrenchWeb, a blog and mini-media empire focused on the fast-growing world of French startups, just raised an angel round of almost $1 million from 17 French web entrepreneurs. 

Founded only in 2010, FrenchWeb says it had 270,000 Google Analytics unique visitors in June. The site, which started out as a simple series of video interviews, often breaks news and has quickly become a must-read resource for French startup folks, and this investment just speaks to how well the French startup ecosystem is doing. 

As far as we know, no plans from founder Richard Menneveux to raise his own venture fund. 

Don't Miss These 12 Super-Hot French Startups ?

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