(mt) Media Temple's Social Bunch

Team members: Sara C - Social Media Lead, Matt L - Social Media Rockstar, Nick M - Tweetologist, Mike G - Tweetologist, Gonzo - Tweetologist, Miguel P - Support Video Visionary, Shannon L - Tweetologist, Laura S - Tweetologist, Nick H - Tweetologist

(mt) Media Temple is a web hosting company. We provide 24/7 customer support through phones, Skype, support requests, and social media channels. As you can see on our Twitter page, our feed is fully staffed & always responsive to any and all mentions of our company. Aside from our usual support channels, we’ve also utilized the use of video to provide a unique form of customer service.

As with any technology based service, we sometimes experience system issues. When this happens, we need to relay important, time sensitive information to a large audience. Sometimes we can receive upwards of a few thousand Tweets in an hour, along with hundreds of phone calls and support requests. While we can’t exactly respond to thousands of individual tweets in a timely manner, we do respond to a majority of messages we receive during incidents. Phones, live Twitter updates, and the use of our system status page all act as critical channels during system incidents.

One day in February, we experienced an issue that affected a large group of customers. Unfortunately, our system status page was on the fritz and the phone lines were getting jammed. Twitter became the most looked to channel for receiving information, but as we all know, limited to 140 characters. We decided that recording a video update would achieve 2 things:

Provide the necessary amount of information
Add a personal touch and instill a sense of trust that we were working towards a solution

We quickly recorded the video from the support floor & tweeted it out. It was an instant hit! Following the incident’s end, we began working towards a standard method for producing support update videos.

While our Twitter feed is our primary social media support channel, the use of video has become increasingly popular among our customers (and other companies!) We now find that, more often than not, we’ll receive more praise for the way that we communicate during an incident than complaints about the actual issue.

No matter what avenues we experiment with to provide customer service, one thing will never change- we will ALWAYS be available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year.

@jpetersen I've loved interacting w/ you guys. I've gone from a $20/mo customer to $195/mo.
@swire Brands on twitter take note - @mediatemple responsiveness is exactly what people expect. Thanks ^SC for your prompt reply
@EricWizKidOdom Gotta give major props to @mediatemple for the support they gave today. Above & beyond what most other providers provide. Thanks ^ML & (mt)
@sthcrft More brands/services could stand to learn from @mediatemple on using social media and engaging with customers.