During some recent wanderings on Twitter looking for some interesting names to follow, I happened across the Home Depot Twitter Account. This seemed like a fabulous resource for a myriad of coupon codes, special offers, advice, tips and so on but what I saw instead was a one-sided conversation the Home Depot representative was having with a plethora of complaint Tweets. Most of the feed goes something like this:

@AlexDeGruven Saw your tweet about the flooring, sorry about that, can I help

@cymbalmom1 Saw your Tweet, Sorry we let you down and thnx for your feedback. Let me know if I can help in the future.about 4 hours ago from web in reply to cymbalmom1

@BoerneSearch Sorry to hear that. I’ve asked someone to contact the manufacturer, in the meantime can you DM me your contact info?

@tvjamesGlad to have you back Hey, If we ever mess up please reach out before you walk away though

Now, I am no Chris Brogan or Peter Shankman but it appears to even a novice social networker that this doesn’t seem like a very valuable use of the only corporate Home Depot Twitter account available. First, it occurs to me that public responses to DMs give you only one half of the picture. Plus, it leads one to believe that Home Depot is basically full of unsatisfied customers (whether or not this is true is irrelevant). Rather than use the feed to provide project ideas, special in-store discounts, product announcements, or just plain damage control, they have what amounts to a public customer service line.

I would think that large organizations such as Home Depot already have a strong social networking strategy in place but that appears to be an erroneous assumption. So the best we can learn from this is basically “how not to do it”.