So Zappos.com's CEO Tony Hsieh is on Twitter today promising a free pair of shoes to one of his Twitter followers at 9 PM today. It was an idea suggested by one of his Twitter followers, a guy named Pokai, who writes the blog Shiny, Happy People.
He updated the deal a little while later to allow the winner to also give free shoes to 10 of his/her Twitter friends.
This is just brilliant for so many reasons. Tony has been on Twitter for a while and actually uses it-- he tweets about his life, business things-- he has conversations with people on it, something certain other Twitter proponents don't.
The shoe give-away is sure to get lots of press, even if just in the blogosphere, since it's the first corporate Twitter stunt (or at least the first that I'm aware of and I tend to know everything.)
And it makes me like him and his company. Zappos is decidedly not a Prom King Brand™, but giving away shoes and using Twitter like that makes me think "hey, this guy gets it."
Which is always a good thing because it makes me more prone to listen to him and to his company's message.
(And if any of you guys win, I'm an 11 Narrow.)
UPDATE: Check out Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh's timely comment and offer to help out frequent commenter "Toad's Sixth Reader" with a customer service issue. Power of 2.0 at work.
Hsieh is also continuing the give-away by selecting two Twitter followers to fly out to Las Vegas and tour Zappos' operations there.
5 comments:
funny you mention zappos. My sister in Ireland is addicted to a certain style of american skechers not available in europe. So she tries to order a pair
from zappos. They claim they take "internationsl" credit cards. Rather big of them considering the worldwideness of the web.
So my sister places her order. And then zappos.com emails her asking her to fucking FAX copies of her credit card AND her ID to them. remember this was supposed to be an Internet transaction! So i offer to pay it using my credit card. I call up zappos. Apparently me offering to pay for my sisters skechers with a valid credit card is an impossibility. Just cant be done.
So I swear at the zappos person, hang up, and order the shoes off skechers.com and ship them to my sis.
Even dumber than that, zappos sent me a spam email annoncing they now also sell, wait for it, cookware!
Of course! Shoes...cookware. Why didn't I think of that.
His tweets had bloody better be good!
didn't mean to swear. sorry. but it just happened recently and the whole thing was mind-bendingly uncool for an online company. and the cookware thing i think is proof that zappos has completely lost the plot.
hey sixth reader -
if you want to email me directly i'm happy to look into the details of your sister's transaction. my email is tony [at] zappos.com.
based on just the information you gave, it sounds like it's because she lives in ireland, and unfortunately we don't ship internationally (except for canada).
we do however accept international credit cards for domestic shipments, but due to the large amounts of attempted fraud from international credit cards, we've had to put into place extra security procedures which include what you mentioned.
anyway, feel free to email me and i'll look further into it.
as far as zappos selling cookware goes, yes i agree it's a little crazy. but we like to be fun and a little weird sometimes.
Thanks for following up on this Tony. It really shows that you guys are interested in putting your customers first. Your candid-and-helpful responses are greatly appreciated.
thank you tony for taking the time to personally get involved in this. i feel much better now.
still not sure about the cookware though ;-)
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