Virgin Media and easyJet respond to my Twitter critiques

Yesterday I blogged about corporate Twitter accounts. I followed it up by tweeting @virginmedia and @easyJetCare with my criticisms. Here are my tweets and their responses:

@virginmedia Are you aware that your feeds are hidden in the sidebar of your Twitter background? Screenshots here: http://bit.ly/8YF37R
12:59 AM Apr 28th via TweetDeck

@domeheid There’s a lot of information we need to put on there, will pass on your feedback all the same so thanks =) BMc
about 13 hours ago via TweetDeck in reply to domeheid

@easyJetCare Are you aware that your Twitter background is pixellated? Screenshots here: http://bit.ly/8YF37R
1:00 AM Apr 28th via TweetDeck

@domeheid Thanks for your comments. We will have this checked. ^DB
about 15 hours ago via CoTweet in reply to domeheid

It’ll be interesting to see how long it takes them to actually fix the glitches – if they even intend to. Watch this space. Or better still, follow me on Twitter!

What makes a good corporate Twitter account?

My first homework assignment for the IAB social media practitioner programme is to write a blog post critiquing two corporate Twitter accounts: one who gets it and one who doesn’t get it. Examples that Henry Elliss gave in his talk at the first session included @twelpforce (25,542 followers), @easyJetCare (6,048 followers), and @virginmedia (10,775 followers). All three of these companies use Twitter for customer service – a brave choice. The nice thing about this is that they are able to respond quickly to their customers. Virgin Media and easyJet initial their tweets to that you can trace them back to a particular employee.

One thing I noticed about Virgin Media was that their background image is too large so that some of the information is hidden unless you view the page fullscreen.

Whereas easyJet’s design has no such problems:

Although there is a bit of pixellation (meh):

Don’t quite get it
The Highways Agency (@HighwaysAgency) uses Twitter like an RSS feed. I’m not sure this is a good thing. Are you supposed to read through all their tweets in case you spot any roads that might affect your journey? It might be more useful in a mash-up or if you set up a custom search to find all tweets referring to specific roads, e.g. A34 or M40. But then you might as well just go to their website; unless you’re on the move and accessing Twitter through your phone. Maybe it isn’t so bad then. But then again, only 196 followers. This is an indictment that they don’t interact at all with their followers. We are after all talking about social media, which implies that you should have a two-way conversation, not a lecture.

Whilst the Highways Agency is guilty of over-tweeting, the Midcounties Coop (@MidcountiesCoop) has only tweeted three times in 2010 so far and has no sort of branding whatsoever. They haven’t even uploaded a profile picture. No wonder they only have 41 followers. Maybe they just figured “if you don’t have anything nice to say then don’t say anything at all.”

Gets it
Quidco (@quidco), “The UK’s no.1 cashback & voucher site”, has a nice balance between highlighting their best deals and sharing consumers’ feedback by retweeting their success stories. They also use it as a quick way to respond to customers’ concerns and refer them on to their support team. 3,105 followers prove it’s at least more popular than the Highways Agency and the Coop. These figures are quite good compared to big corporations like Virgin Media and easyJet.

One thing to note about Twitter accounts that are used for customer service is that followers may only stick around while they have a specific query. Once their issue is solved, they may stop following (I know I would). If my brother is anything to go by, Quidco users are quite loyal and always on the prowl for a bargain.

What have I learned?

1. Don’t over-tweet.
2. Respond directly to followers.
3. Get your branding right.

I’m interested to know what corporate Twitter accounts my fellow Rising Voices in social media are blogging about. Let’s get these pingbacks going!

Note: The company I work for, Torchbox (and in particular Rob Salmon, Director of Digital Marketing), encouraged Jonny Grum and me to attend this course at the IAB in London so we could develop our social media skills. By the end of the course, I will be a certified Rising Voice in social media!

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Using game dynamics to drive participation

Going out and checking in

I’ve been using Foursquare quite a bit lately (here’s my profile). There’s a lot to be impressed by: not least the level of mobile integration. Foursquare doesn’t make much sense if you’re sitting at your desk, so it’s far easier to see where your friends are and check into a new location from the mobile app.

The way it promotes participation is even more interesting. The designers decided that just seeing where your friends were, and getting personalized travel tips, weren’t enough. You gain points – the same kind you get in Sonic the Hedgehog, say – for checking in at a location, exploring new places and telling the app about venues it’s never seen before. In turn, the points lead to badges, and there’s a weekly leaderboard for the top scorers among your friends. There’s no real tangible value to any of this, but you feel good about joining in. As a result, Foursquare is hugely addictive.

Open source participation

Over on Twitter, I asked:

Could the game dynamics used by apps like Foursquare be harnessed to make a more participative open source community?

Open source projects depend on contributions from their communities. Getting people to participate can be difficult; although many people will join in because it scratches some kind of itch, moral incentives like a place in the credits help. However, adding these kinds of game dynamics over the top could provide an extra push. Currently, the only quantifiable open source contributions are source code patches, and any software project has a lot more going on; this would provide an opportunity to quantify other, equally useful forms of participation.

Game dynamics in the enterprise

Graeme Hunter pointed out to me that this model wouldn’t solely be useful for open source. An internal project communications framework that also incorporated game dynamics could be a very interesting platform for ideas, solutions and internal innovation. He’s right; I think it’s an idea to keep in mind if you’re looking for software to use internally for your project.

There are also implications for online communities, where game dynamics are often already used (to rate individual contributions, for example). What if we used similar ideas for education? Or a community centering around journalism?

Photo by dpstyles, released under a Creative Commons license. It’s of a Target store in Milford, Massachusetts, where they use game dynamics to encourage faster checkout times.

Update: Graeme comments below with an exploration of what a participation framework using game dynamics might involve.

Related entries

• Charging for software in the age of web apps (2)
• Direct messaging in a social web architecture (3)
• Activity Streams and OAuth: a social web architecture (3)

Reflecting on 2009

The Christmas period is traditionally when I take a step back and consider what I’m going to do over the next year. For me, it’s a time for family, for quiet reflection and for evaluation. What have I done well? What will I do better next year?

During 2009, I left Elgg, the project I’d been developing for five years, and concentrated on real-world contracts and projects. I spoke at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, and met some very interesting people who are going to provide a new model for news reporting in America. I’ve been working with them for the rest of the year, and look forward to writing some more about that project soon.

I’ve also been working with a local publisher in Oxford, creating GeoRSS feeds for their content and paving the way for a mashup with the official University of Oxford mobile site. Imagine walking around your hometown, seeing rooms and apartments for rent displayed on an augmented reality browser, superimposed on the streets themselves. It’s just one way that the web is meeting simple, real-world needs with innovative approaches that are quickly beginning to resemble science fiction. Data is being mashed up and made available in increasingly sophisticated ways.

I expect mobile to come into its own in 2010, particularly now that the mobile Internet market is projected to be twice the size of its desktop cousin. Augmented reality and applications like RedLaser are the more obvious manifestations of this, but I expect the nature of web publishing as a whole to subtly morph. Platforms like WordPress are beginning to recognize this in small ways, such as adding native support for the Twitter API, but expectations are being set far higher than this.

Hardware like the iPhone, the assorted Android handsets and smartphones like the Palm Pre are very affordable multimedia all-rounders which have turned ubiquitous connectivity into a mass-market feature. People are going to expect to be able to save any digital content from anywhere, and share it with anyone. In 2010, I intend to help them.

Related entries

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Twitter Etiquette – my 2010 will be…

… slightly different…

I love Twitter.

No, really.

I am a massive fan of the microblogging service. I like the brevity of 140 characters. I like the fact that it works on my phone and I can use it anywhere.

But I have some issues, not so much with Twitter, but with the way (or ways) the service is being used by just a few folk.

*Issue #1*
I have noticed – and increasingly so – that there are some people who sometimes just ’say’ things on Twitter, simply for the sake of ’saying’ things. Like, for example, when they have run out of things of their own to say.

Which, frankly, is stupid.

Let me paint a picture with a hypothetical question.

Would you stay subscribed to a person’s blog feed if a significant percentage of their output comprised randomly uncompiled links from some (pretty rubbish) sources, out-and-out marketing hooks and thinly disguised adverts for various hardline commercial concerns?

Would you?

No, of course you wouldn’t. I wouldn’t either.

And that’s why I am here now, making a firm statement that from this point onwards I have no intention of following a Twitter feed if it is composed of a similar calibre of utter piffle.

Harsh? Yeah, maybe, but look.

I know that every year a few bloggers give up blogging for no reason other than they’ve they run out of things to say.

But if a Twitter user has run out of things to say (and seriously, it’s only 140 characters – and, you know, there’s no *compulsion* to use it every hour of the waking day) what’s wrong with just taking a deep breath, kicking back and… saying nothing, for a while?

I mean, why do people retweet marketing shit from some global, commercial beauty products conglomerate?

Why?

And while I’m on that particular strand of thought, why would *anyone* retweet pure *marketing* information from some beauty products company who, by their very own admission, actively supports and funds an organisation whose members have repeatedly been convicted of violence?

Yes, I’m talking about you, Lush, you hate-crime funding bastards.

So tell me, why would someone do that?

And why would anyone retweet grammatically incorrect, factually dubious, puerile nonsense from some American ‘life coach’ (whatever the fuck one of those is)?

I mean, if you’ve got nothing of any value to say and you just want to push buttons to validate yourself and get your Twitter ID out there in front of people because you’re feeling so insecure you might fall off the face of this planet in a minute (deep breath), why don’t you find something *useful* from someone else’s words?

Or something appropriate or relevant?

‘Wear sunscreen’ by Baz Luhrmann, how about those words? Those two words contain some of the most helpful, and one of the weightiest pieces of advice ever given to any member of our species.

Wear sunscreen.

And how about ‘Don’t shop at Lush because they give a shitload of money to people who terrorise innocent, law-abiding folk’?

In fact ‘Boycott Lush for life’ would be words of almost equal value as ‘Wear sunscreen’.

*Issue #2:*
Here’s another Twitter nonsense that is, frankly, beyond all sensible, reasonable logic:

Follow Friday.

What the hell?

Look, here’s my piece of thinking on this Follow Friday Phenomenon, condensed down to three simple sentences.

Don’t.

Do.

It.

If I want to know who you follow I will look up your Twitter profile and… look up who you follow. I may even read their backdated tweets.

It’s easy, isn’t it?

And it cuts both ways.

If you want to know who I follow on Twitter (and that’s a pretty big ‘if’ for a start, because why would you?), why don’t you go to my Twitter profile and just… see who I follow?

Honestly, the notion that I can single out a handful of the worthies who I follow on Twitter for praise, from the hundred or so people I do follow is, frankly, ludicrous.

By the same string of logic I don’t understand how anyone can single out a handful of who they follow, in order to highlight them to a wider audience, without tacitly devaluing everyone else they follow.

Unless, of course, people are highlighting *everyone* they follow by rotating them on a regular basis to ensure everyone gets equal coverage.

In which case, WTF is that all about?

Does anyone else understand just how much this kind of situation demeans the whole tool?

Or the service?

Meanwhile I’m supposed to sit here and have Friday’s incoming Twitter streams clogged up by some people I follow, each promoting a dozen or so *other* people who I could look up?

If I could be arsed?

Am I really supposed to put up with that?

Here’s a hypothesis for you.

How about this: I follow people who I want to. But if they start acting bizarrely (see any of the above) I’ll unfollow them.

Deal?

*Issue #3*
Here’s another pile of Twitter wrongness.

People constantly retweeting random people.

Look mate, you follow them if you want, but your default position should be that every one of your followers *does not* want you to recycle someone else’s tweets.

And here’s a scenario for any serial retweeters out there: 35 retweets and reposted links in less than an hour? Do you think that’s good? I’ve got news for you, it’s very bad.

Look, if people do that, then under my 2010 Twitter Etiquette, I will unfollow you.

If people are looking to reduce the number of people who follow them, they should just carry on with the multiple fucking retweets and reposted links and see what happens.

In my eyes anyone who produces multiple retweets is doing something that is on a par with producing spam. Think I’m alone in this view? Ask around.

In fact, does anyone think my logic is left-field on any of these things?

Think again.

It’s a little like blogging; if someone constantly behaved as badly on a blog, their blog would haemorrhage readers – and everyone know it!

The same applies to Twitter.

Simples.

So this is my Twitter Charter for 2010.

I shall live by these rules.

I’ll close with one simple statement:

Twitter users should follow the (heavily paraphrased) words of Bambi’s mother: If you can’t think of anything good to say, don’t say anything at all.

It’s the quality that makes the tool good, *not* the quantity.

Publicity is the top word

After the Global Language Monitor, following numerous publicity-maximising delays, finally announced they’d spotted the ‘millionth word’ in English (which was 2.0, lest we forget), I naively expected that they would go away for good.

Alas, they have not done so, and are now back with their latest piece of lexicographical tomfoolery, a list of ‘top words of 2009’. Apparently by means of a magical algorithm that takes into account “frequency, contextual usage and appearance in global media outlets, factoring in long-term trends, short-term changes, momentum and velocity”, they’ve come up with a list that includes Twitter (at no. 1), Obama, H1N1 (the “politically correct” name for swine flu), and vampire.

As far as I’m concerned, this is obvious nonsense. But I’m apparently alone. Not only did it get picked up in the media, it did the rounds on Twitter too. Because I’m sad like that, I looked through all 600+ Twitter posts that linked to the Global Language Monitor list, and not a single one of them was even mildly critical of it in any way.

I’m not sure that there’s a point to this in any way, other than this drives me mad.

Publicity is the top word

After the Global Language Monitor, following numerous publicity-maximising delays, finally announced they’d spotted the ‘millionth word’ in English (which was 2.0, lest we forget), I naively expected that they would go away for good.

Alas, they have not done so, and are now back with their latest piece of lexicographical tomfoolery, a list of ‘top words of 2009’. Apparently by means of a magical algorithm that takes into account “frequency, contextual usage and appearance in global media outlets, factoring in long-term trends, short-term changes, momentum and velocity”, they’ve come up with a list that includes Twitter (at no. 1), Obama, H1N1 (the “politically correct” name for swine flu), and vampire.

As far as I’m concerned, this is obvious nonsense. But I’m apparently alone. Not only did it get picked up in the media, it did the rounds on Twitter too. Because I’m sad like that, I looked through all 600+ Twitter posts that linked to the Global Language Monitor list, and not a single one of them was even mildly critical of it in any way.

I’m not sure that there’s a point to this in any way, other than this drives me mad.

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