I recently had a text from O2 saying I qualified for an upgrade to the 3G iPhone which naturally interested me as my contract expires in June. So I called them this week to be told the text was an error and actually I am not entitled. I argued the case with the call centre that if they say I am eligible then I am eligible, but they just said it was a mistake and no, I was not eligible. However, I would be eligible in mid May but I couldn’t do it now.

Grrrrr

So, O2 have been on Twitter for some time and I have always followed them. I pinged them my grievance. They responded swiftly and over the course of 24 hours we maintained a dialogue and they looked into the problem.

The ultimate outcome was that it was a mistake and they can’t rectify it. The fact they paid attention, continued a dialogue and ultimately spoke plainly made my customer experience soooo much better than a call centre can ever achieve.

The fact that I don’t know ‘who’ was twittering on behalf of O2 does not matter, they connected with me in the channel I preferred and left me with a very positive opinion of O2 customer support. If only other brands would do the same, Evernote - are you paying attention?

Thank you O2.

http://twitter.com/O2UKOfficial

www.twitter.com/jamieriddell

These are my links for April 23rd through April 24th:

• Enterprise: List of 40 Social Media Staff Guidelines | Laurel Papworth- Social Network Strategy – This list also includes policies called; Staff blogging policies, enterprise social network guidelines, Employee Blogging Policies, Staff engagement in online communities, and so on. I’ve done a few press (radio, print) interviews this week re: Telstra so I thought I should have another look at how Enterprise, Government, Corporates, Not for Profits are handling the fact that their staff are members of social networks too.
• Virgin Atlantic’s ‘steamy’ ad dubbed ‘sexist, offensive to women’ | Sindh Today – England’s Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has received 29 complaints over the ad campaign, which also includes press advertising, insisting that the ads are insulting to women.
• Amazon.co.uk – Fulfillment by Amazon – Amazon can store, pack and ship goods for you.
• Majestic-SEO : Compare domain backlink history – This tool generates unique charts that are rarely seen outside of R&D labs of the best search engines out there: it shows backlink discovery by month. We hope you will enjoy playing with this tool as much as we enjoyed making it! It currently ignores subdomains, but in the future we might produce this data for subdomains too!
• Would you pay for a Facebook vanity URL? | Blog | Econsultancy – As Facebook's unbelievable growth continues unabated, the company is increasingly finding itself scrutinized by critics who are asking a simple question: 'where's the money'?

Image borrowed from Googlified

Google Profiles came into the spotlight this week. Not brand new but finally gaining traction, it is a place for you to share your profile, including short biography and link hub for your various profiles and interests.

The profile can be customisable to allow others to email you without sharing your personal email address which is cool, although the whole profile is still limited in its function.

Naturally being a Google property it scores well on the natural listings with my profile now appearing at the bottom of page 1 for ‘Jamie Riddell’, and no doubt I expect it to rise to the top over time.

The growth of Google profiles will have ramifications for other profile sites not least Plaxo, and to a lesser extent, Linkedin. At the moment, the Google profiles are somewhat static so they don’t have the social connection and feed updates that characterise Plaxo, nor do they have the in depth business details found on Linkedin. Howrver, this being Google, I expect the Plaxo elements to come in over time and no doubt include Gmail/Contact/Calendar integration which then starts to put clear air between Plaxo and Profiles. If that happens, I would struggle to see the benefit of staying on Plaxo apart from maintaining a ubiquitous presence on all the key social networks.

What none of these services have yet to offer, and something I had hoped Plaxo would do, is to offer a centralised profile ‘blurb’ which populates each site you are on, much like Gravatar can centralise your avatars. Couple this with Open ID and we have the beginnings of a social network lynch pin.

Yet again, Google comes round the back with something that could be a long term game changer.

www.google.com/profiles/jamieriddell

My last post made me chuckle at the sheer chutzpa of marketing departments. Back in the eighties when you were frowned upon for taking ‘two bottles into the shower’ Wash & Go became a well known brand (is it still?) and was clearly succesful. So succesful in fact that the brand owners decided to do a shampoo on its own.

The brand, ‘Wash and Go Solo’ – Genius! Quite why they never called it just ‘Wash’ was a mystery to me..

I have decided to run two blogs, this one will be my ‘official home’ if you like where I can continue to talk about the things that interest me in the world of marketing, ’2.0′ and beyond. I also wanted to share other more trivial things that interest me or that are more of a personal nature, so I have decided to set up an alter-ego.

www.idontdosudoku.co.uk will be the place where I can share other stuff like my passion for music, pop culture and general stuff. It is also the place I can play around with some coding and generally use it as a test bed. So if you see the site looking trashed, its probably because I am doing something.

After this post I won’t be actively pushing the other site but you are welcome to pop over and say hello. The latest post includes music videos from Massive Attack, The Verve and Fat Les – if you pop over you can see how they are related..

TTFN

Hey. All the previous posts have been imported from my old Blogger account. I have infrequently maintained a blogger account for some years now but I don’t see any major steps forward on blogger from a customisation and CMS perspective so I felt it was time to bring them over here and close it down. So long Blogger!