An open letter to Persimmons Social Media Team

As my readership will understand at this point. I’m a little bit annoyed at persimmon Homes. Read my earlier blogs to understand a little bit of why. If you can’t be bothered to read my previous posts (Completely understandable due to their length) then a short summary is shown below…

Persimmon stick up new homes in Brundall, Norfolk. Me and my partner (Kate) decide to buy one with a commitment that it will be built by July 2014 (We paid the deposit in Feb 2014). What comes over the next 9 months is delay after delay in the completion date, a complete failure to communicate with us, ridiculous pricing for things you can buy at over 50% less from places like B&Q and a house visit by us that culminates in discovering a Solar Panel installer doesn’t know which way to install solar panels and a set of builders who clearly can’t follow build plans and decide to erect the loft hatch over a wall in the bathroom. All this whilst we are on the brink of being made homeless 6 days before Christmas.

Still with me?

Anyway. Over the last few days following my email to the Chief Exec of Persimmon Homes I’ve been doing a bit of research around Persimmon and their practices. What I’ve found has been pretty interesting (Although not surprising). Along with the countless complaints about Persimmon and their lack of attention to detail, I’ve also seen some pretty amazing examples of how not to do social media on their part.

Here is a flavour of the last 24 hours if you search Persimmon Homes on twitter…

And this is just from a 2 minute search on Twitter.

What’s interesting is the complete lack of interaction on the part of Persimmons social media team to any of the posts. Its not just me that’s noticed this either. Customers, Ex-customers, potential customers and one or two well known TV programmes are all included in the comments yet Persimmon merrily continue posting new pictures of homes they are (allegedly) building at the moment.

I thought I’d do a bit more digging (Its not like I have a new house to be moving into right now or anything – eh Persimmon?)

So I checked their Facebook page. It feels like I’ve walked into a warzone. In between the wonderful pictures of houses which I’m sure will be built on time (Hell freezing over is available as an alternative abode) are lots of comments asking why x house hasn’t been completed yet and why peoples comments are being deleted?. As a bystander it makes fascinating reading so I urge you to go and have a look. What’s even more interesting is the complete lack of interaction from Persimmons social media team to the comments. Oscar Wilde said ‘The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.’ so I guess Persimmons social media team have this engrained into their keyboards as they happily post another picture of a 4 bed ‘deceptively spacious’ home down south on their Facebook page.

I didn’t stop here though. It was interesting to see the number of likes on some of Persimmons posts. Particularly where they were advertising homes at opposite ends of the country, the thing I noticed was that the likes seem to be coming from the same group of people, even when the properties being advertised could be in Scotland and Devon. The same people are liking and sharing them. Does this seem strange to anyone else?

I’ll let you check their page for yourselves but needless to say Persimmon, if you are really that desperate for likes, maybe you should keep some of your existing customers happy? Rather than having to pay marketing companies to assign you likes to your posts!

I’d be shocked if it wasn’t a pretty good indictment of how crap Persimmon are at everything else. What makes anyone think that their social media strategy would be any different?