West Berkshire Waste use Twitter to crush recycling rumour
Has anyone else had that snotty note and seen your kerbside recycling rejected because a can had fallen into the glass tub? What makes it all the more galling is that quite often you see the bin men (can we still call them that?) chucking it all in together anyway!
Well @WestBerksWaste is the voice of the waste management in Newbury, Hungerford and throughout West Berkshire on Twitter and do give out good relevant information... so earlier today I posed them a question on Twitter. I asked:
Question for @WestBerksWaste why do we separate glass and plastic, only for bin men to mix it up again?
Now, the tales of businesses failing on Twitter are legion, and this is just the sort of question that left unanswered would damage a brand further. It was retweeted – or republished – numerous times and would have reached a not insignificant audience.
I am happy to report that in a trio of tweets (that pesky 140 character limit!) @WestBerksWaste was able to explain itself in a reply to me @nigel_morgan:
There’s a small number of vehicles in fleet with 2 compartments instead of 3. They only mix some of the recycling not all. They take it for processing (which all the recycling needs to go through) and all gets recycled. We can’t guarantee where they’ll be working, so can’t say to those areas it’s ok to mix recycling. They support other trucks/rounds whenever needed.
My concerns answered via Twitter and I have already mentioned it to neighbours who were complaining about it. This may mean there is a wider consultation issue, but as far as Twitter goes @WestBerksWaste has illustrated how well a problem can be dealt with through social media.
I’m not sure if they also responded to those who ReTweeted my original question and certainly if you wanted to be sure that the message had gotten through, this would be good practice. Better still a supporting and provocatively entitled blog post: ‘Why we sometimes mix up your carefully sorted recycling’ – which itself could be regularly tweeted – could have explained in more detail and had a more lasting impact.
The future of Twitter and indeed social media in general will be local. Twitter recently rolled out ‘local trends’ which for those of us in the UK means we can now see what the national Twitter audience is tweeting about. Soon that will be rolled out to a much more level still.
In Newbury, West Berkshire it is businesses like solicitors Charles Lucas & Marshall (@clmlawbits) and independent health food store Natures Corner (@natures_corner) who are using Twitter and already seeing it impact on the all important bottom line.