Since
Etisalat unblocked Twitter in August of 2008, it has tweeted nine times. Nine. (To be fair, though this is more than the Twitter account
Etisalatsucks, which has only Tweeted twice.) Du, in contrast, has tweeted 1,608 times since opening its
Dutweets account four months ago.
This rather stunning difference was pointed out this morning by Yousef Tuqan Tuqan, the chief executive of
Flip Media and himself something of a
master of the medium. He also pointed out the nature of du's tweets, which will shock anyone used to dealing with telecom customer service through the usual channels (and the soul-crushing despair that usually ensues). A few tweets taken at random from today's Du queue:
@hmdqdrshk Sorry if we didn't communicate it clearly, you need to spend AED 100 per month to get the free data for the next month
@cnystedt Thanks for that! We'll follow up on that and see what we can do :)
@fatsochef Sorry for that! We'll investigate the issue and make sure we restore the network for you.
@jassim You're completely right! We'll pass your feedback to the responsible parties and follow up on it, thanks :)
Touqan points out: "It turned into a help desk. And people said, thank God somebody is listening...This is how you use Twitter. This is how consumers are starting to speak to companies in the 21st century. This is one of the few examples of companies in the UAE who are doing it right."
I'd say on pretty much any service-related front this holds true - du clearly has a better team of people looking out for its customer-facing brand, and that includes its slick website, friendly customer service, cluey use of twitter etc. Even in the way they talk to the media, du seems friendly, Etisalat just doesn't care in the slightest.
In short, Etisalat is run by engineers and civil servants, du is run by marketers.
Another factor here is that Etisalat is still something closer to a government department than a nimble private company, with layer after layer of management and decision making and permissions etc.
I can imagine that some smart web-friendly kid at du thought up the twitter idea and got it approved in two weeks, while Etisalat is still pondering the idea through committees, consultants and a whole universe of Very Important men.