Even before the Betfair Poker intrigue, I’d been planning to write something about corporate Twitter feeds and the tone that they take.

This is because of a run-in over Christmas with the Australian entertainment retailer Fishpond.com.au over the late delivery of Christmas presents (there was no snow or flooding to blame).

Fishpond: srsly?

As their website said it was taking up to 72 hours to answer queries, I decided to try their Twitter feed instead, which promised to help its customers. To their credit, they did get back to me promptly, but I was really surprised to find that the feed appeared to be written by a 14-year-old texting one of their mates rather than by adults dealing with paying customers.

I said as much, to be told that it was so they could fit the info into 140 characters (being the sad pedant I am, I proved to myself that the message they sent me could easily have fitted into 140 characters without all the textspeak).

Anyway. It’s easy to criticise the bad. How about the good?

Personally, I really like the Southbank Centre twitter feed and think it hits a nice tone (disclosure: I do some work for them). I suppose not having to respond to irate customers disappointed that their Christmas presents won’t arrive on time helps with that.

A quick survey on Twitter about the best and worst does shows that getting it right isn’t a mysterious process.

What other people liked was help in dealing with complaints, which isn’t much of a surprise, but also useful information – such as their local pub (in this case Deptford’s Royal Albert), tweeting what beers they’ve got on tap. A couple of people cited the @BetfairPoker feed too.

Shoe retailer Schuh was cited as a good example – full of chatty shoe talk, with emphasis on customer help. For good customer service Twelpforce, which is run by the US retailer Best Buy, O2Priority, BTCare and VirginAtlantic were cited. The theme running through these feeds is that they are pro-active and helpful, but I think they also have a professional tone.

Apart from the sin of omission (Tesco and United Biscuits were mentioned for this), the feedback I received suggested the things that most annoy people about corporate Twitter feeds are constant self-promotion and only responding to good comments instead of bad.

So why don’t more companies get it right? I suspect the biggest problem is not having someone in-house who enjoys using social media, but I’d be interested to hear other theories.

UPDATE from you

I thought I would add any tweets that come in with people telling us who they have experienced doing a good job on Twitter.

@wardhaugh: @BrandRepublic – #Cityjet use Twitted effectively for one to one customer care

@gwilliamrob: @BrandRepublic @HeathrowAirport, excellent during snow

@craig4589: @BrandRepublic @cpwcares  are good. Shame people have to deal with them so much as their instore support is rubbish!!

@LeapfrogLive: @BrandRepublic not many really.  Too often used as a monologue rather than a dialogue, and feared rather than embraced.

@netnatives: @BrandRepublic @innocentdrinks are super at twitter.

@agent3012: @BrandRepublic Some others Twitter support companies to look at include @XboxSupport & @SamsungService.