No Change In 9 Years
Yesterday I learned something about myself. I am not addicted to Facebook. Twitter I can take or leave. I can also exist without email. But I have a high dependency on PHONE.
I was also reminded about how stressful it is when you set up your own business.
What happened yesterday that got me all in a tizzy?
I was porting from Vodafone to O2. I contacted @vodafoneirl back at the start of June to talk about the transfer. Was dealing with a customer service representative called Daz who I had thought did a fairly good job. At the end of our conversation, I asked him:
To which he replied:
So you’d think that would be it! But no. He forgot to tell me that I needed to unlock my phone. Silly me, I was under the belief that because I paid for it, I owned it. But no, the stupid system of phone locking means that it’s blocked from use from other networks and can take up to 3 days for it to be unlocked. Don’t try telling me this is a security thing. It smells of anti-competitive behaviour rather than criminals to me.
So anyway, I discovered yesterday at 4.30pm that Vodafone Ireland had given me wrong advice. And I’m still without phone (17 hours later).
The others, O2, were just as bad. They sent me a wrong SIM last week, according to themselves when I tried to switch over. I had to wait for another one, which when I tried it yesterday was also wrong. I had to go into a store, get someone to activate another SIM, was told it’d take 15 mins to work… big mess there. Also failed in their customer service.
The thing is… all this got me thinking to how stressful it is setting up a business.
My business was 9 years old a couple of weeks ago
I was reflecting on the different stages of Brightspark and the Internet’s evolvement.
- 2003 – 2005; Early days. I had to always make the case for setting aside budget for internet marketing. The “build it and they will come” years of the dot com boom weren’t that far behind. There were lots of web shops in this town, but not a lot of people doing internet marketing you know!
- 2006-2008: “I want a site and a number 1 on Google” was the main request. Post Google’s IPO, everyone wanted to be on it. Most of my time was spent explaining that you can’t easily get a number 1 ranking on Google for a popular keyword if you don’t have that keyword liberally scattered in real content across your website!
- 2009-2011: Social Media magic time. Here I learned loads about social and how to run a social media campaign – both at scale and on a budget – to achieve business objectives. “Do I need a Facebook Page” is the number 1 request. And often the answer was NO!
- 2012: Still doing social but very focused on measurement and monitoring to find actionable opportunities to feed back into the content marketing side of social media. Anyone can knock out an editorial plan, give advice on how to engage in the various platforms, and there are some very good app developers around. But for me the smart money is in the metrics, and using the right software to listen out.
For anyone who read this blog back in the early years, I was always having a rant about this service provider or another…and that is because when you set up a business, you need to get all your services sorted, you probably need to get them done fast and efficiently because you have work to do. But I found that dealing with mobile providers, broadband, hosting, etc. they never seemed to do what I needed them to do.
Sadly, 9 years on, when I went to effect a simple change – from one mobile provider to another – it’s still the same. Stress city. A loss of earnings of half a day as I tried to sort the problem yesterday. And still no phone today.
But this seems to be common knowledge. I got lots of knowing smiles, and ‘this happened to me’ from my work colleagues in the office yesterday. But why do we accept it? And is it the same in every country?
If anyone needs to contact me today, you’d be best to email me.