An Australian software-as-a-service company has taken advantage of the WebCentral email outage by launching a Twitter campaign.
Cleartext, based in Sydney, sent out a tweet this morning offering a 20% discount on its services to former WebCentral customers, and claiming that it has had a 100% “uptime” record over the last 12 months.
David Banes, chief executive of Cleartext, says the company uses social media to play around with its customers and even gain potential clients.
“I’m sort of pushing the boundaries with our social networking to see where people start pushing back,” he says.
“We’ve been in the social networking space for a while, but usually it’s targeted elsewhere and I thought we’d have a bit of fun with some direct action with this tweet and see if it gains interest.”
Banes says while the company joined the “Twitter revolution like everyone else”, the firm is now using a internally-built content aggregator to constantly watch social media updates about competitors.
He argues the real-time nature of social media means businesses wanting to reply must be on the ball.
“You can respond to issues quickly with this method, and spot PR or sales opportunities. If you’re waiting for Google to index your page it takes a couple of hours and you might miss the opportunity,” he says.
“We’ve got business already using this mechanism and we’ve got leads and one conversion in the last month.”
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Patrick Stafford is a freelance journalist and a former deputy editor of SmartCompany.
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