Ecoweb Embraces Social Media With New Website

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Ecoweb Facebook Page

Ecoweb Facebook PageEarly this week, Ecoweb replaced their old (and kind of stale) website with a fresh, bright and actually nice looking one. It was long overdue and Ecoweb’s parent company, Econet, should consider doing something about theirs too.

Besides the fresh look, what is really interesting about the new Ecoweb website is that it brings with it a social platform to (hopefully) engage customers and communicate accountably with them. Ecoweb has created a Facebook page and visitors can subscribe to it right from the Ecoweb website. The page so far just has a few fans (probably Ecoweb employees) but it’s easy to imagine it’ll have hundreds in a few weeks. This is a significant change towards connecting directly with customers and should be hailed.

Ecoweb should realise one very important thing though. With public social network platforms like Facebook pages comes great need for accountability, and they should be ready for it. A Facebook page is a public question and answer platform where people can and will demand answers about products and services. This is very different from a customer making a call or privately going to the Ecoweb offices to ask why their Internet is slowing down. Everybody witnesses everything.

Whoever it is at Ecoweb that will engage customers on the Facebook page needs to understand this and have the necessary people skills. Such a job is not left to an impatient techie who doesn’t realize the implications of candid talk with an irate customer.

Social media experiments by parent company Econet haven’t exactly been rosy and serve as a lesson for all of us. The page reflects what people (that have access to Facebook) think about Econet. More than once the page has suffered severe backlash from customers demanding answers. And more than once got very worrying responses from the (supposedly) Econet business development employee manning the page. Take this post in May for example where Econet asked:

Quick Survey: Do a speedtest if you are using 3g Right Now? Good speeds should be 60k and over. Post your results on this page. Just the speeds no comments! Go to http://www.speedtest.com/

While some responses provided the required data, some negative responses that came include:

My friend, admit that you have flooded the 3G network with customers where you did not have the capacity to services such customers.

You guys are working reactively, trying to sort out the mess. Please improve and give us hope for inspiration. Inspiration Is Key but don’t be “Inspired To Take Our Money”

its actually speedtest.net NOT speedtest.com – anyway i used to get speeds of 60k-100k in December 2009-March-2010 since then its been up and down, now more down than ever…. getting 5k on 3.5G useless!!!!! my dial up modem is faster hahaha

between 0 and 10… since I have econet, I have never been able to update antivirus; after having been online for around 6-7 hours today, my computer updates are at 57%… have never been able to connec to 3G despite reaching a signal, nobody from Econet can tell me about the settings… come on, this does not deserve to be called internet service!! It is a ripp off to sell us expensive lines that are totally useless!!

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3 comments

  1. Richard

    Sir

    You’re right. All Econet can do is make something look nice, whether it works or not is besides the point.

    1. “Help us improve our service by taking a survey” – does not work.
    2. Discussions and Commnunity – Community is spelt wrong.
    3. I’ve lived through the bull and never ending promises of service, speed, reliability – the list is endless. If GPRS and 3G are useless then 4G will be a more expensive version of the same rubbish.

  2. Tech

    I concur with you. I understand Ecoweb are selling WiMax as 4G, FWIW WiMax is the predessor of 4G (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4G#WiMAX) which is just another rip off.

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