Telstra closes nowwearetalking.com.au

brilliant. now all that faff can be lost forever in the mess that is telstra.com

Telstra locked the public out of their NWAT Twitter account a while back, and now the site proper has come down with what looks like zero warning.

It’s hard enough to lure people to your corporate propaganda site, let alone convince them to participate in discussion. But to shutter it without warning? To leave conversations half-finished, with no archive or advisory? Dumb.

So, what will the Social Media Experts have to say now? The ones who rah-rah’d Telstra for “getting” Social Media?

About time.. Thanks David for undoing the hugely propaganda machine formed by the Sol era..
It was never about customer service or consumer complaints or any real purpose
other than for Telstra and some die hard loyal Shareholders to tout their gross propaganda. Lets hope David can get some worthwhile project up and running to take its place. “Nowwearelistening”?

NWAT refugees can head over to the real conversation at No, WE Are Talking (http://nowearetalking.com) or keep in touch with each other at http://nowwearestalking.com

@ Leslie
NWAT was only ever an example of how not to do online engagement, in my opinion. Strong arming your staff and abusing journalists is hardly best practice, now, is it?

I always used to get a slightly creeped out feeling at the NWAT site. It’s how I imagine the North Korean government could sound if it suddenly fast-forwarded to the social media age.

@Sarah: It worked out pretty well for me 😉

Have your say about Telstra’s disgraceful behaviour on a brand new site (still a work in progress) http://telcovictims.com – vent your spleen!

I agree completely with Sarah & Bill. NWAT was somewhere between ‘toddler having a tantrum’ and ‘the supreme truth office of Kim Jong Il’. And then there was the ‘Telstra Active Supporter’ program it spawned which was equally bizarre — a collection of sycophantic Telstra zealots who defended Telstra using all sorts of illogical arguments reminiscent of the worst of Apple fanboys. I think these people did Telstra’s reputation more damage than good.

I note that Telstra’s Craig Middleton posted the first post on the new site — http://telstrablogfeedback.com and if he is looking after it as a whole, I expect it will be far more informational and less tanty. I won’t go as far as suggesting it won’t carry the occasional B.S. spiel — after all, no matter how good the PR, he still has to represent what the company wants said. But I do know that Craig has a track record of being able to diplomatically apply a strong B.S. filter within the company, preventing a lot of it from getting outwardly excreted.

@Dan Yep, I always had good dealings with Craig Middleton too. That is a good sign.

lol – telstra are so FAIL again. One thing you can rely on with them is anything they do will turn to sh*t.

Let’s take a moment and remember the peak of NWAT (which is dangerously close to TWAT) when they asked the viewers to vote on who they thought was responsible for the poor state of broadband in Australia. Standard options as you’d expect, and surprisingly, Telstra was there too.

Whirlpool got wind of it, and being the most educated broadband community in Australia, they knew exactly who was to blame. About 10,000 votes later, telstra was the blame holder with about 98% of the votes. Yep,. that was Australia talking.

But again, Telstra didn’t hear. Anyway, they’ve jumped the shark now, and there is absolutely nothing they can do to attract a whole segment of the market. No pr, no marketing, no deals – the abuse has runs too deep, for too long.

Now a bigpond account represents ignorance – yep, you have the most expensive ISP, with the worst service.

So, go die telstra – your death will make more people happy than nearly anyone else.

Stop pretending telstra get social web … All their efforts are overblown and embarassing. Mumbrella surely has better news to cover than this non event … Surely there’s a newspaper typo somewhere they havent covered or a social media scam to pr??

Perhaps the best sign of all is the statement that “The new site will be dedicated to allowing us to talk with you, but more importantly – to listen to your views, opinions and ideas.”

So in short, it’ll be less Telstra using the Web like a megaphone to spruik its propaganda and attack journalists who dared question The Wisdom Of Sol, and hopefully more about a two-way channel for communicating with customers and listening to them, which is exactly how the social Web should work in a case like this.

“About time.. Thanks David for undoing the hugely propaganda machine formed by the Sol era..
It was never about customer service or consumer complaints or any real purpose
other than for Telstra and some die hard loyal Shareholders to tout their gross propaganda.”

What’s changed? At last month’s results David explicitly stated that “Telstra’s main concern is for its shareholders”: therefore customers and the community come last. It’s exactly the same message, just with an Australian rather than an American face.

Seems like they don’t want a public forum anymore for people to air their grief (or praise..if any).

Seeing that Super Mario left the country with his big bag of coin, I thought Thodey would want this type of thing…seems like the crown of CEO is too tight for his noggin’

C K – but they’ve opened a new site called http://telstrablogfeedback.com.au where people can go and post their opinions now.

Went to it and it did not interest me…it will be a big horn tooting session from Telstra with branding and colour scheme..

The good thing about NWAT it did not have the Telstra feel about it…

Maybe I’m lucky. Maybe I don’t like all telcos. A few years ago I dumped Telstra mobile for Optus. Better price – but the service was … well was it service? I switched to Vodafone – it would be great if I could get a signal and when I do, if I could keep the signal for more than a few minutes.

The only comms that seems to work virtually faultlessly (gulp – do I even dare say this) is … my Telstra landline and my Bigpond cable. No, I don’t work for Telstra, and know no-one who does (joke there – but no-one WORKS at Telstra). I run my own small business from home and have done so for seven years. In that time I have had three BigPond outages for a total of 4 1/2 hours downtime. Am I just lucky, or should credit go where credit is due?

Bummer – I was getting help with issues on that site that support failed to deal with!