Twits and Tweets

Speciality Bites with

Paul Hargreaves

Chief executive of Cotswold Fayre

• Becoming a B Corp
• Top trend predictions for Christmas 2021
• Self-sacrifice: The importance of building a leadership legacy centred on others
• Undercover Boss
• Can/should bosses really be close friends with their staff?

Back to an old subject this week, the power of social media

And this is the type of blog I hope our competitors don’t read as none of them seem to have embraced social media as we have.  In fact it is disappointing how many of our retail customers haven’t harnessed Facebook and twitter to generate footfall in their shops as generally these tools work even better for the B2C businesses than they do for the B2B.

Having said that we are seeing a few customers coming to us each month via twitter which is certainly worth the time we spend on it.  I talked to one on the phone last Friday, who until I spoke to her, was disappointed that someone hadn’t called them back within an hour or two of her posting on Twitter.  I think she assumed that all 40 staff at Cotswold Fayre had access to our tweets, when the actual reality of it is that less than half of them actually know what it is, let alone have their own accounts!

Since our new web-site went live nearly a year ago, we have had very few complaints come in via Twitter, which is good as every tweet to or about @cotswoldfayre is live on our web-site home page instantly. I took this decision when most don’t as I believe in full transparency, and having any negative posts visible for all to see gives us a good opportunity to take corrective action and also let everyone know.  The old adage is true: a company is judged not whether it makes mistakes or not, but how it corrects them.

The second way in which I harnessed the power of twitter this week was by tracking down someone who owed my partner over £1400 for work she had done a couple of years ago and was never paid for.  The company she worked for is now based in South Africa, and by posting to their twitter account, I alerted several employees of more moral fibre than the owner (twit!) who applied pressure on him to pay the money.  Even this didn’t work first time, until I threatened to up the social media campaign when one of the non-exec directors and shareholders stepped in to pay back the money!  Clearly this is a route of last resort if companies are owing you money, but powerful, your customers don’t want their customers knowing that they don’t pay their bills.  However, only use it if you don’t intend to carry on being a supplier to that company.

I am writing this on Eurostar to Paris to attend SIAL, which has to be one of the best food shows in the calendar, I’ll let you know more about that next week.