Kenyans are taking to Twitter to report bad service and behaviour by organisations and individuals.
The “TwitterBigStick” hashtag has been used by thousands of Kenyans to give instant feedback on negative experiences, such as bad driving and poor service from businesses, with numerous companies having responded to complaints on the social media site.
This method of raising complaints provides ordinary Kenyans with an instant way of channelling feedback, and follows the lead of other online methods of tackling corruption and poor service, most notably the “I Paid A Bribe” Web site: ipaidabribe.or.ke.
The “BigStick” project is primarily driven by management consultant and writer Sunny Bindra. Bindra has written a book on customer care in action and sees himself as a protagonist for helping organisations in Kenya become more efficient. He argues that the movement represents real democracy at work.
“TwitterBigStick is a crowd-sourced initiative that is run and governed by the crowd,” he says. “It tries to stay entirely neutral and has no vested interests whatsoever. It has been initiated for the general good, because ordinary people are fed up of neglect and of being taken for granted as customers and users.
“It is for the collective to decide what is credible and what is not, and what complaints to support by replying, mentioning or re-tweeting. There is no central authority of any sort,” he notes.
Kenyans are very active on social media sites, according to a recent report in the UK's Guardian newspaper, saying the country ranks as having the second most users of Twitter on the continent with 2.48 million tweets during the last three months of 2011.
Kenyan companies including Kenya Power, Kenya Railways and Safaricom have already responded to complaints about their service on Twitter, while even the United Nations and the British High Commission in Kenya have responded to issues and promised to address any problems.
Though the hashtag is aimed at organisations with brands to manage and reputations to protect, the power of Twitter to hold even senior political and military figures to account was recently demonstrated when Kenyan military spokesman Major Chirchir tweeted old photographs for what he claimed was a recent stoning incident in Somalia.
Once Twitter users realised this, the Kenyan military was forced to release a statement stating that “the incident gives us an opportunity to improve on our public information dissemination mechanism.”
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