My 3 Years On Twitter
December 7, 2009 at 9:17 am
By Bernard Goldbach, aka @topgold:
Bernie’s been using Twitter three years now and he wrote a good and succinct post about his thoughts on the experience.
During the past three years, Twitter has been most helpful in curating content for me. I use mobile phone RSS feeds to pull information from 12 Twitter accounts onto the screen of my phone where they’re often as informative as news headlines. I’ve learned that even when some people stop tweeting, they continue marking content as “favorites” and those favs are part of the genre of curated content.
I have discovered ways to boost blog readership, to increase the number of views of a Flickr image and to attract viewers to my movie clips by posting summaries of that kind of content on Twitter. I’ve also seen a bothersome rise of self-promotion, petulance and pettiness on Twitter. Like in the real world, packs of little minds run around on Twitter but the wonderful thing about Twitter is that you can just unfollow the pettiness with a single click.
You can read the whole blog post over on his blog, Inside View From Ireland.
Tags: Twitter
Customer Service 2.0
November 30, 2009 at 9:04 pm
A good post from Darragh Doyle last week has got me thinking more about customer service and how big corporations can use social media tools to solve it. Darragh’s been spending some time with eircom’s online customer support team recently, sharing some of his wisdom about how to engage online.
This isn’t rocket science
It’s saying ‘hello, I’m here to help, can I?’
He wonders if eircom management actually look at all the call centre logs and email queries and identify problems that need to be fixed, then throw their weight behind getting them fixed? (Sadly I think not).
He makes a good point that to engage successfully using Twitter or in the broader sense of online, it requires a shift in metrics – not to measure the number of calls that were answered, but the number of interactions to get things done.
This reminded me of a post by Seth Godin who imagines a new type of customer support. One in which asynchronous results are not guaranteed, but one in which senior management are hired and fired on their ability to solve problems. It requires a new approach to customer service, but it makes a lot of sense to me:
1. Customer service problems go into a system and work their way up the customer service pyramid. Each person who touches it either takes responsibility for solving it thoroughly and completely, or passes it up the hierarchy. Any problem not solved within 20 hours goes to some senior level executive who gets it solved or gets fired. (I’m serious).
2. At the end of the month, there’s an easy trail to follow. You can see who solved the most problems. Who’s passing the buck when they should be grabbing it. You can identify the delighted customers and what delighted them.
I guess what it boils down to is ownership and transparency.
If customer service teams are incentivised on number of problems solved, rather than number of calls answered, it will push a new ownership mentality into teams.
If corporations continue to embrace social media tools as they are, then there will be transparency as we can all see if problems are being addressed or not.
The two go hand in hand.
Tags: customer service, Social Media, Twitter
Remove Twitter Anxiety Now
July 27, 2009 at 7:32 am
Countless articles have been written in mainstream media about Twitter; some journalists love it, others hate it (or don’t get it?). Numerous discussions on LinkedIn, many self proclaimed ‘social media experts’ give seminars on how to Twitter. Even my 76 year old mother knows about it – God forbid she asks me to set her up with an account!
I believe that all this hype is putting pressure on business people about Twitter. I’m asked at least 5 times a week, “should we be on Twitter?”.
The best person to answer that is yourself.
Why don’t you have a listen to what’s being said on Twitter about you, your business, and your industry?
- If there’s a lot of talk, and you feel you have something to say, then get on Twitter. Set yourself up with an account and take part in the conversation.
- If there’s not a lot of talk, you’ve had a listen and put your fears to rest, so next time you read about Twitter you can salve your fears by knowing that you’ve had a look and it’s not for you.
One of the best applications I’ve come across recently for listening to Twitter is Twilert.
Twilert is a bit temperamental; I wouldn’t rely on it. I have searches set up for IKEA and I get about half of them.
The reason I like it is because it sends an email (at a frequency selected by yourself) with a summary of what’s being said on Twitter. It fits in with the email mindset that most corporates still hold. What I really like is that you can set it to monitor a specific geographic location. This means you can monitor the buzz in Ireland only, or UK, or the whole world if you wish – or even within a 5km radius of where are.
How To Set Up A Twilert
- Register on Twilert. It’s free.
- Once in, select the ‘advanced settings’ button under the main box:
- Type in the words you want to track. It’s a good idea to set up different alerts for your name, your company name, generic keywords relating to your industry, product names, competitor names, and any other ‘need words’ you come up with. By ‘need words’ I mean words that people would type when they need your product (they just don’t know it yet!).
- Select the frequency of send. You can even choose a time of day. I’d recommend mid afternoon so you have time to respond to any tweets on the same day if you want to.
- To limit the results to Irish-only buzz, type in your location under Places – make sure you type “Dublin Ireland” so you’re not stuck with that other Dublin in the US. Then select what radius you want. For all of Ireland, select “within 500km”.
- For this first raising of the periscope, let’s listen to everything. Later you can limit the results to positive or negative, or even asking a question. You may choose to set up separate alerts that get sent to different parts of your organisation, so that ‘asking a question’ tweets go to sales, ‘negative’ tweets go to customer service. But that will come later.
- Hit “Create A Twilert” and you’re done.
What You Can Do Now
- Shortly you will receive a Twilert in your inbox. This will show you all the mentions of your keyword in your specified location over the past 24 hours.
- I set up one using the keyword “eircom” just to see what people are saying. Predictably, it’s not all good:
- Click the links to visit the Twitter profile of who’s doing the talking (or tweeting).
- If you were eircom and you were using Twitter properly, you could be using Twitter in so many ways. Reputation management, sales, customer service. What do you think Ann Donnelly’s response would be if eircom tweeted her with a special offer to keep her business? I think she’d be bowled over. Vodafone Ireland is already using Twitter very effectively for just over a year now. Check their profile here.
Very quickly you will be able to decide if Twitter is a place you need to be.
It’s like blogging. When I’m doing blogging training, I make the point that before you set yourself up with a blog and start writing, it’s a good idea to first read blogs, comment a bit, and then go. By reading and commenting on blogs you are taking part in the conversation. And that is what blogging is. Therefore you are a blogger even before you get your own blog.
Similarly, with Twitter, you can listen and watch first before you jump in and set up an account and take part regularly. Adding Twitter to your communications mix does require commitment and resourcing, albeit nothing too onerous. My advice is to go ahead and have a listen. If you find your customers are on there talking about you, then get in touch and we can have a chat about the next steps for you.
Tags: buzz monitoring, twilert, Twitter
Twitter Nostalgia
July 21, 2009 at 8:40 pm
I’ve detected quite a lot of Twitter nostalgia of late. Last week’s flavour of the moment, When Did You Join Twitter tool got me thinking about this little ‘review piece’ that we did one Thursday afternoon quite some time ago. We used to have “R&D Thursdays” in which we’d research new things that took our fancy on the web. In this one we review the following three ‘new’ sites:
- Spanglish (one we did for a client so a blatant plug!)
- Stumble Upon
It’s gas. I can’t believe I wore my hair like that only 2 years ago!
Tags: nostalgia, spanglish, stumbleupon, Twitter, youtube
Twitter Success Story
January 19, 2009 at 6:21 pm
Just as every campaign should have a digital element, so too every digital campaign ought to have a Twitter element. The latest success has left me flabbergasted!
Before Christmas we launched a new site for The Rose Project. The marketing includes Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, and other elements. I knew that for people to follow The Rose Project on Twitter, it had to have a hook and so we pledged that we would only provide good news. In these dark months of winter 08/09, subscribing to a little good news from a charity that’s doing life saving work in Africa is an attractive proposition indeed…
So attractive that someone from Amazon became a follower of The Rose Project. That’s how they found out about The Rose Project’s wrapping paper. And now Amazon are in discussions with The Rose Project on distributing the wrapping paper.
Now that’s a good news story if ever there was one. And the beauty of it all is that it cost the charity nada!
You can follow The Rose Project on Twitter: www.twitter.com/theroseproject
Update: here’s a great round up of US companies listening and responding to their customers through Twitter.
Tags: Amazon, The Rose Project, Twitter
Great Way of Updating Contacts
November 27, 2008 at 9:30 am
With the best of intentions to update my Twitter following list, I never do. I often think it would be so beneficial to visit the websites of all the people following me, and find new folks to talk to, engage with, learn from. But I never do because I like to knock off work after the mandatory 10-12 hours!
Now that’s been made easy with the beautiful Mr Tweet. It’s a nifty little app that recommends people who are following you that you should follow. And recommends people you should follow that you’re currently not. This bit is based on who you follow, and who they follow also.
I like it. It’s neat, informative, works really well, and absolves me of guilt for not updating my following list. It gives you information about the person, the number of times they tweet on average per day, and their following response action – ie. follow everyone, follow some, etc. I don’t care about that last bit. I’m not in the business of following to be followed.
The one thing it doesn’t do is filter for annoying people! There are quite a few recommendations that I have simply ignored because I used to follow them and their constant moaning or bitching just got me down. For what it’s worth, I like to use Twitter to listen to people who:
- Have something interesting to say
- Are generous with their links, ie find something great and pass it on
- Are funny, witty, amusing. Positive, light, fun.
- Are not self obsessed and only tweeting about themselves and their lives
If this is you, and I haven’t found you yet, do please follow me on Twitter. When I see your follow, I’ll always have a look and if you seem sound, I’ll follow you too.
Welcome Twitter Friends!
March 16, 2007 at 8:59 am
So you want to check me out and see if I’m worth following on Twitter or not?
A bit about me on Twitter. I’ve been using it daily since 16 March 2007 (use this tool to find out more). I don’t publicise my Twitter account on my business card and other marketing material as Twitter is a place where I engage with my peers and be myself. I use search, email, phone and face-to-face for talking to clients and people I wish to impress. If you are a client, and you’ve found me, that’s great! If you are impressed, all the better!
I think it’s very important to have it clear in your mind what you’re using Twitter for.
- Conversations - it should always be about conversations and chat. I use it predominantly for that. I work largely alone and I miss out on the water cooler chat that goes on in large offices. I get my water cooler chat through Twitter, but lucky me – my fellow conversationalists happen to be the smartest brightest people that are hand-picked and followed by me!
- Questions – sometimes I prefer to ask the Twitterverse than go to Google. Google results tend to be skewed towards those who have invested in search engine optimisation. (Nothing wrong with that, if you want some of that, go here). For example, the spelling and grammar police are alive and well on Twitter. I find if I have a spelling/grammar question, the responses come thick and fast as you can see here).
- Getting & Giving Help – in October 2007, the hard drive on my mac book pro failed. This happened 22 days out of warranty and because I was using dot mac to back up data, I found it very difficult to find any of my stuff. I put out a bleating Tweet (=general tone feeling sorry for myself) and I was literally inundated with offers of help. The huge rush of generosity and human support still makes me smile. Likewise, if I find someone having a bad day, I do my best to send some smiles their way.
- Pimping – occasionally I use Twitter to pimp something. A blog post I’m particularly proud of. A piece of work that’s just gone live. A new furniture assembly and kitchen installation business.
There are many other uses for Twitter, but these are what I use it for. If you are interested in learning more about how you can use Twitter, get in touch and we can have a conversation.
Now will you do us a favour?
Please let me know if you do decide to follow. You can do this by addressing a message to me, like this @maryrose (then say whatever you like). I have the follow notifications turned OFF because it was just getting too noisy. The downside of this is that I sometimes miss out on great people who are following that I could follow back. So if that’s you, just let me know you’re there and I’ll follow back.
You’ll notice that my approach is as far from the creepy automatic DM some people send when you start to follow them!
That’s it from me for now. I hope we get to chat on Twitter, shoot the breeze, share links, help each other out. See you there.
Tags: Twitter
