Wednesday, May 07, 2008
Personal Space on Twitter
Today a friend of mine had a problem with Comcast and posted about it on Twitter. They responded, and her internet is working again.
I had heard that the company is monitoring tweets with its name in it when I was at the New Comm Forum, so I replied to her about it. I added in a little criticism of Comcast too, as much as my 140 characters would allow. Even though following Twitter is a smart move for a company to put out the small fires before they become something more, it isn’t a substitute for improving their overall support.
Some background: I have never been a direct subscriber to Comcast, but I was forced into servitude while renting in Portland, OR. We rented two different places from the same property manager and had vastly different experiences with Comcast service in each. It was enough of a difference to make me question if the address on the bill shaped the quality of service available to customers.
Before heading back to Juneau for a month in December, we were staying at apartments on NE Prescott & NE 20th. During that time we shared an internet connection through a quadraplex and not once did we have a problem with Comcast. When we returned in January we moved into a house on NE Rosa Parks Way. We did not have consistent internet service for longer than a week during the three months we were there. In fact, when we arrived both the cable tv and internet were down even though the owner had been paying Comcast when the house was empty. It was a non-stop battle with the worst customer service I’ve experienced the entire time we were there, and enough to make us swear off Comcast at the expense of potentially slower internet service in the future.
So when wscottw3 and comcastcares responded to my response to my friend, rather than feeling all warm and fuzzy from the attention I got a case of the creeps. It turns out I’m not alone, there are other tweets about this type of invasion of personal space by Comcast on Twitter.
Can a tweet really go that far? Twitter isn’t private—it’s very public. Watching tweets is not so much eavesdropping on conversations, it’s more like perusing blogs. We all know our Twitter messages are all over the web for anyone to see, unless we chose to lock it down.
There is a definite need to explore the concept of personal space online. Is it different when a representative of a corporation contacts you than when a person finds you because of similar interests?
Perhaps our spaces on the internet can be understood in a similar way to how anthropologist Edward T. Hall looks at interpersonal spaces. It becomes more acceptable to be (physically and digitally?) close to someone the more you like that individual.
My friend can certainly respond to my tweet, others that I know or who have similar experiences can as well. And Comcast helped her, as a customer, fix a problem so their interaction was not invasive. But when it extends beyond the social realm, and turns into brand management, that does feel like an invasion of personal space despite the public nature of the conversation.
Sites to use to search Twitter posts:
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