How Local Telcos Are (Not) Using Social Media

A brief introduction to those who aren’t familiar with the telecommunications market in Singapore: it’s ruled by 3 players – SingTel, M1 and StarHub. That means competition is stiff amongst the 3, but it also means they have enough clout not to keep them on their toes in terms of CRM.

I’m singling out SingTel and zooming in on this brand simply because I’ve seen too many of their complaints flying around social media platforms and not being addressed.

A month ago, SingTel broke news that it would be offering social media monitoring services to SMEs.

Uh……..

It’s not that it isn’t an ingenious plan – it definitely is a useful tool, and it clearly fills a gap that many of the leading social media monitoring tools don’t; that is, monitoring social media within Asia via Asian languages. (Still, not all of it. They’re missing a huge Indian pie.)

It’s just that… have you seen what people have been saying about SingTel on the world wide web? It really makes you wonder if they’re talking the talk. Let me do a quick Google search of updates –

6 out of 9 updates within 40 minutes were negative. None were positive. (Unhappy smileys and neutral smileys – courtesy of me.)

Is SingTel doing anything to address these angst-ridden tweets? By the looks of their Twitter page – 567 followers and 0 tweets – I guess not. The slightly more active SingTel Youth Twitter account isn’t doing much else but tweeting about promotions. In my desperate attempt to find out if they were monitoring anything, I tweeted:

No response. Save for a few RTs. (And we all know fellow writer @ameliachen‘s got my back.)

So much for social media engagement.