Today I posted a link on twitter and facebook referring to the hacker that took an MMO game hostage I also added that I thought the company should pay more attention to their, but some readers took that as though I was supporting the actions of the hacker. This was not the case. My thoughts were that I felt if the company paid more attention to their community this hack probably would not have happened. I know you can not please every whim from your customer base, however if several of your customers are asking for the same things then you should/need to appease them. There are plenty of companies that are showing excelent examples of how to handle and help their community. And one that is just surprising me everyday is Microsoft and its twitter Xboxsupport If you have a xbox follow this crew they are unstoppable. Let’s look at one particular case and break it down on how they are listening and ENGAGING with their community.

Here is a conversation I was following in twitter:

This is how you should do it!

Okay so lets break this down. I will break this down in way so that people who don’t use twitter will understand the full awesome of this post. My friend Chupacaubrey was trying to play Battlefield Bad Company 2 and could not connect. She … expressed her frustration to her entire follower list which is 557 people (potential customers). She did not message xbox directly and she was not really saying anything pleasant at all. However on the next message we see Microsoft’s Xbox Support team jump into the conversation. They were Actively Listening to their community. Meaning they must have search terms going for negative sentiment towards the word xbox. I could go into further detail but that will be a later post. Now from this point on they go into a dialogue of troubleshooting and blah blah… the meat of THIS post is in the first two messages. Microsoft is now controlling this negative experience before she would even call tech support or continue to spread negative messages to her friends. As you can see she turn off her xbox in frustration and I am sure she could have continued to say negative things about MS and there live network. But now the tables have turned, the team is in action fixing the issue. Even if they don’t fix it think about this: She did not even get the chance to call tech support! If you can’t see the awesome in that, then you need to close your doors and stop doing business now. Also note one very important thing. This entire conversation was public. They didn’t go behind a closed door to fix the issue. Let me know what you think?? Can they keep this up? Is this feasible for every business?