Cards and Tweets
I have been a bit under the weather the last day or two and my brain has been in space wondering about random things. One of those things was if the card companies joining Twitter and supposedly talking to the collectors is going to make any difference in the products or are they just doing it to keep people who already buy cards regardless buying them.
Personally, I feel like someone at Topps was given assigned to the tweeting and maybe they know about cards, but maybe this is just part of their job since they work there. Could it be just a secretary or some dude who does the budget there tweeting to all of us to make us feel like they care about us?
The funny thing about it is that there are people kissing their asses (Topps and UD) on Twitter thinking that this is going to be their “in” for whatever. I’m all for being polite and trying to get sponsored or whatever, but really, you don’t even know who is on the other end of that computer.
Another thing about this, they don’t seem to be asking for any feedback on what we think of their products and when you give it to whoever it is, they just say thanks or sorry. Wow, you make a crappy product or don’t put the correct relic/auto in a box and the resolution is “sorry” and maybe a crappy unrelated replacement?
I think if these companies want to be “interactive” with the collectors maybe they should listen to the things we all blog about and tweet to them and make a note. We are the people buying the cards regardless of the target demographic for any of these cards. I’d be willing to bet that any kid I walk up to and ask how many Topps Attax cards they have would say, “what are those?” as they throw down a pile of WoW cards or Yu-Gi-Oh, or whatever.
If I lost you by this point, sorry. I just felt like seeing if anyone else was thinking about this or had some sort of opinion. I’m going to go back to reading my cardiac notes now and try to make sense of that and see what you guys think of this.
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you should see the war some guy started with me on Topps facebook page regarding "Topps Issues".
As card makers are latecomers to the social media party, my sense is that much of the activity by card companies on Facespace and Twiddler still are more about another avenue for promotion and one-way mouthpiece communications.
I do have to give UD some credit though, that their Facebook presence so far seems to be more dialogue-based than I would have expected. They have some good folks on the other end of the fan page.
However, it's not too hard to learn how to use social media more effectively, and they'll figure it out pretty quickly, as long as policy issues don't get in the way.
eTopps deserves extra credit. Although they don't manage a page on Facebook, and the eTopps tweet feed is empty, they did hold three different conference call sessions that could hold up to 100 callers at once. Anyone could call in, and speak directly with eTopps product managers and staff with questions and complaints (and occasional praise).
I only participated in the first call, but I could see that it didn't take long for changes for some of the issues raised. I don't know of any other card maker with that kind of customer response commitment. I hope eTopps does it again, at least twice a year or so.