Managing Your Business Reputation on Twitter

Twitter can be an invaluable tool for businesses: the social marketing site lets you connect to customers, reach out to new customers, and cultivate a user-friendly, tech-savvy brand.

However, a single misguided Tweet can damage your business reputation, as Progressive Insurance discovered earlier this year.

In a nutshell: Matt Fisher wrote a Tumblr post accusing Progressive of refusing to pay out the premium on his sister’s policy after she was killed in a car accident.

What Internet users found even more egregious was that a representative from Progressive aided the defendant — the other driver — in a civil lawsuit.

The situation went from bad to worse when Progressive sent out a series of robo-Tweets, responding to every single Tweet the company received about the incident with, “This is a tragic case, and our sympathies go out to Mr. Fisher and his family for the pain they’ve had to endure. We fully investigated this claim and relevant background, and feel we properly handled the claim within our contractual obligations. Again, this is a tragic situation, and we’re sorry for everything Mr. Fisher and his family have gone through.”

These Tweets did real-world damage to Progressive’s business reputation beyond the Internet. MarketWatch reports that over 1,000 people  have already dropped Progressive as their insurance company as a result of the incident. 1,600 others claim they will not use Progressive in the future.

The Progressive incident offers a few lessons in managing your business reputation on Twitter:

1. Be wary of robo-Tweets. Many companies use automatic tweeting to post links, blog posts, etc. – but in this case, automatic tweets came off as cold and impersonal, repeating a point that people already found distasteful.

2. Tweets are forever. Never post a Tweet that you would not want re-posted on a blog, website, etc.  Even if you delete a Tweet, users may have already taken screenshots or copied the text.

3. Establish a Tweeting policy. Especially if multiple employees have access to the company’s Twitter account, be sure to establish a policy designed to deal with a range of customer service and PR situations.