Thursday, March 25, 2010

Twitter to the Rescue!

About a week before spring break, several students from the St. Edward's chapter attended the Public Relations Student Society of America's National Assembly. Luckily this year the event was held at downtown Austin's Hyatt Regency, so we had a very small commute compared to others!

A little sidenote-- This event was occuring during SXSW so I was a little concerned about parking (but then again, when in Austin are you not?) I had looked on the website at hotel parking prices and they were running at about ohh.. $18.00 per day. Panicking that I would spend close to about $60.00 dollars just on parking that weekend, I decided to call the Hyatt Regency. I was a little frustrated to be put on hold a few times, but that was really the least of my worries. I asked the concierge if there were any special parking permits that were available to students attending the PRSSA event this weekend.. and the answer was unfortunately a big fat "No."

I was pretty determined not to pay $60.00 so I turned to an alternate method of communication (drum roll please...) SOCIAL MEDIA! I logged on my Twitter account and found the account for the Austin Regency Downtown. I was already live tweeting with the National Assembly hashtag, #prssana, so I decided to tweet the Hyatt about their parking. I asked them, once again, about special parking prices for our event and was instantly retweeted by a few other students who also were concerned. A little less than 20 minutes later, I spotted the Hyatt's reply to my question and it was good news, FINALLY! They made parking only $5.00 for the weekend for us! YES.



I was pretty please that social media saved the day.

1 comment:

  1. That saved our weekend Courtney! I remember that the first day of the assembly when we found this $60 parking news out. You told me about your Twitter rant and I thought "What a great idea, but will they take us seriously as students?" I guess they certainly did. I think that Twitter has become a place where companies can find complaints and make sure that their customers are being taken care of. I am sure all companies are afraid of a Twitter storm or a unhappy customer tweeting to other unhappy customers. Even as students we can Tweet our selves silly and make a huge difference! Good Job Courtney!!!

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