Tweet and AT&T Will Listen?

I have no idea how many times I’ve said a bad word about AT&T but a good guess would be two for every dropped call since I bought a first generation iPhone. So we’re talking thousands. While not a replacement for better service, AT&T does deserve credit for its efforts to monitor outages through customer tweets. According to ReadWriteWeb,, http://technolog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2010/11/30/5553105-att-turns-to-twitter-to-track-your-dropped-calls “those (at AT&T) monitoring the system then uses the time-stamped tweets and locations and compares the data to customer service calls. Twitter trends can even indicate service problems faster and more efficiently than customer complaint logs, which take longer to log and analyze.” I’ll take the half-full view this time and say this will lead to improved customer experiences. The half-empty view is that this is a publicity stunt that will do nothing other than put AT&T in a good light.