In a great initiative by Telstra, Bigpond have set themselves up on Twitter. What a great way to connect to their customers.

But, like in so many cases, old practises don’t work with new media. They’ve almost applied the same rules you would to writing your customer a letter.

You’ll notice that nearly every one of their responses is the same spammed message on where to send an email. Instead of directly dealing with the issue at hand, they lead the customer to another place. And the tweets aren’t even unique, just copy paste jobs.

You’ll also notice the ® after every use of the term BigPond. Lame. And not very personal.

I think it’s great to see them jump on board. So so so much potential. But at the moment they’re not really Twittering, just using Twitter.

Hopefully their social media response team isn’t just on Twitter and will respond to this blog post too.

So what is a good example of a company using Twitter? Check out NASA, and even then they’re only using it as a broadcast.