User or Customer – the same difference?

We all hate examples of poor customer service, whether before, during or after we’ve made a purchase.
Who can blame us for being intolerant of service failures – I mean, if we pay good money for something, it should work shouldn’t it?

But here’s the thing – what about those services that have become like oxygen for our digital lives?
Twitter, Facebook, Skype, WordPress and any other number of free online tools, communities and services fuel our insatiable thirst to stay connected, and they’re free. Surely as reasonable human beings, we make allowances for service failures from these suppliers, because we don’t even pay to use them?

Wrong – it’s counter intuitive, but we’re so addicted to our minute-by-minute, social networking ‘fix’, we seem less tolerant when these services fail, than when a paid for product or service lets us down.
You don’t agree?
Well, just look at the backlash and outrage after a Twitter failure, or Facebook outages – what about your reaction to the poor quality video call the time you Skyped an overseas friend? Our intolerance goes beyond our reaction to service failure, it extends to our reaction when these providers to attempt to monetise the environments they provide through other means, like advertising – how dare they?

What does all this mean? Have we forgotten that these services are free, or have we moved into a new societal model where ‘users’ have the same expectations as paying customers, and we expect the things we choose to ‘use’ to work as well, if not better than those we buy? Are we all just becoming unreasonable or is it that we believe that the time we invest using these tools is payment enough?

What if Twitter charged everyone with an account, a nominal fee of say, $2.00 per month?
They’d certainly receive a direct income from us allowing them to upgrade and maintain their online service.
We’d also be legitimate customers, so would that make us even more demanding and intolerant, or would we all just leave in droves and find a new free thing?

What the f**k is social media – one year on

In September last year I put a link to a terrific presentation called “What the f**k is social media” and I made the point that while a great ‘primer’ for social media, with the speed things are changing, it would soon be out of date.

Well, the authors of that presentation, Espresso, obviously agreed, and have released “What the f**k is social media: one year later”. Excellent, and just take a look at some of the updated statistics!

Twitter in business – walking the line between following and stalking.

Let’s face it; anyone worth their salt in the marketing communications industry (agency side) will monitor the social media activity generated by, or around their clients or business prospects.
There’s nothing wrong with that. We do it all the time for our clients as it can help to provide a ‘finger on the pulse’ view of what people are saying about them, and an opportunity to sort out any customer service issues, real or perceived.
However, this afternoon I witnessed a something quite strange, and it made me a little uncomfortable.

An agency was trying to get attention of  @prospect via twitter.
Various members of said agency had got onto twitter and sent a series of tweets to a potential new business prospect in the telco category.
The tweets amounted to a tweet-by-tweet sales pitch handed on from one @agencyperson to the next, all sent to the @prospect in a continuous burst.

So why did the agency use this approach? Good question.
I guess they thought it was original.
I guess they thought that it would demonstrate that they knew how to use twitter, and it would impress @prospect.
Maybe it was just cheaper than picking up the phone?
It wasn’t exactly confidential as anyone monitoring @prospect’s twitter account could watch the approach unfold.
It also meant that @prospect could look at the agency tweeps profiles and see how ‘twitteractive’ @agency really are.
Would an approach such as this really impress @prospect?
I don’t know – it may be flattering I guess, however it could just as easily be viewed as a bit creepy and borderline.

A smart tactic?  Maybe. Clever? Personally, I don’t think so.
I acknowledge that these tweets weren’t direct messages, and some might feel that it just constitutes another form of public advertising.  However as most businesses set their their company name  as a search feed to monitor and respond to customer issues, it was inevitable that the @agency tweets were going to clog up @prospect’s feed.  If this approach had been used to target a specific consumer, what are the potential privacy implications?
How would a potential business client feel about receiving a ‘concentrated blast’ of emails or phone calls from various members of a hopeful sales company? Probably pissed off and a bit violated – and we know that no reputable business would sanction their employees using such behaviour.
I guess what makes me uncomfortable in this digital era, is that it’s such a fine line between targeted marketing communications tactics, and ‘stalking / spamming’ a prospect.
When are we crossing that line?

Note: the picure in this blog entry is entitled ‘Fun’ by the brilliant illustrator / artist, Gary Taxali.

So, Twitter’s now mainstream – Time Magazine covers it

It’s taken a while, but it looks like Twitter is now a bona fide, mainstream phenomenon, because this month, Time Magazine’s cover story is all about Twitter.

Well done to Twitter, and let’s hope this isn’t a sign that the Twubble is about to burst as early adopters ‘jump ship’ to look for the next cool, edgy, big thing. Probably not this time, because recent research shows that Twitter has (with the exception of ‘Celeb Followers’), got where it is without a lot of support from either Gen Y or the Millenials, probably the most fickle of all groups. No, Twitter has become the SM tool of choice of Gen X and Boomers.

It has become invaluable to users as an ‘interest and link resource’ – once you’ve found key people to follow ( based upon your own interests), you can post and read tweets, and send  interesting links to each other and the group. In effect, these fellow Tweeps become part of your ‘global hive research brain’. The  power of global micro-bloggers in real time!

Anyway, check out the Time article.

The Twitter Experiment – Bringing Twitter to the Classroom

This shows how Twitter can play a useful role in the classroom – it allows everyone to have a voice, even those who would normally be too nervous to speak up in public.

Vodpod videos no longer available.

more about “The Twitter Experiment – Bringing Twi…“, posted with vodpod

TweetStats – we know what you’re doing, and when!

For those twitterers out there, there’s a cool little site that tells you how many times you’ve tweeted, and breaks down what day and time of day you’re twittering. This is just the start though, the site mines lots of useful information about your twittering patterns and on one tab displays it as a serious of cool graphs, on another tab it creates a word cloud of your tweets and tells you your top 5 used words!

However, what makes this really cool is that you can use TweetStats for any twitterer as long as you have his or her user name.

Did I say cool? I guess it could also be used for evil……

Watch out if your employer is small minded enough to have an anti-social media policy at work.  I can already see the news headlines now, “XYZ Limited used TweetStats to prove that employee John Smith was twittering during normal office hours”

So, what’s up with Twitter?

So, what do I have against Twitter?  Nothing. Nothing at all. That’s right, I think Twitter is terrific, and micro-blogging is here to stay.

What I do lose patience with is some of the people who have been bitten by the Twitterbug. Some people just don’t get it. It is too easy to clog up the feeds coming through onto other people’s mobiles and pc’s with inane tweets.

Some thoughts on Twitterquette: