OH MY

When I got my iphone I decided taking out insurance with Carphone Warehouse’s Geek Squad was a good idea. I regretted this the moment I took mine in to be repaired and was handed a replacement Nokia handset. The thing had no wifi, no camera but I still had to pay the maximum monthly line rental whilst my iphone was sent off for 2-4 weeks. To add to my annoyance the Nokia was actually the second phone I was given my first (worse) replacement phone was broken.

After two and a half weeks I was missing my phone. I was sick of getting lost and desperate to take another picture of the sandwich I ate for lunch. The online tracker didn’t seem to be working so of course I turned to Twitter in this woeful time complaining that Carphone Warehouse are ‘shit’.

I had no idea this would actually result in me getting my phone back a lot quicker than if I’d sat back and waited for the actual service I pay for. I talk clients all the time about using Twitter as a customer service tool but I’d never experienced it first hand.

I received a reply from @stuartcarphone the next day asking me to check the online tracker

Which of course I has been checking (I was still at stage one out of five) So @stuartcarphone asked me to email all my details.

Turns out the tracker was down and my phone actually was in the store even though I was supposed to receive email notification when it arrived. I think its great that Twitter is picking up on these things and I love that companies are willing to spend resource on this type of customer engagement. Its just odd that traditional forms of customer satisfaction are still being neglected.

Big thank you to @stuartcarphone and @becksatcarphone

Yesterday morning I jumped on the #moonfruit bandwagon. The chance of a free Macbook Pro for one simple tweet – why not? Now I feel a bit like a dirty spammer…

The first time I was really aware of using hashtags for a giveaway was the blog hosting software Squarespace. For the month of June they gave away an iPhone a day. All you had to do was add a #squarespace hashtag into one of your tweets. It didn’t even have to be Squarespace related.

Initially it seemed like a nice idea. Squarespace are a really nice blogging platform and seem relatively unknown. Twitter users are their ideal target audience, so the strategy seemed like a pretty neat idea.

Unfortunately it went a little off course when the tweet only had to contain the tag #squarespace and didn’t have to actually be related to the product. (Also, they didn’t actually give you an iPhone) The winner was picked at random, so the messages often ended up adding no value to other users and were completely out of context.

Again, this only occurred to me yesterday afternoon when #moonfruit seemed to be taking over my Twitter stream. I love Twitter because based on the people I follow I can cultivate the content stream. When half of that becomes crowded with unrelated hashtags and messages I didn’t like it, even though I was a part of it that morning.

I’m pretty sure there is or was a really good concept in this hashtag strategy. Pick a geeky product for a geeky audience and let them advertise it for you. Unfortunately, I think that was lost along the way. And as more unrelated #moonfruit tweets pour in today I worry about the relevance it holds and how easy it is to turn us into spammers for the chance of a shiny macbook.

I hope that despite Squarespace’s and Moonfruit’s success in creating a lot of noise around their brand, other Marketers can see the difference between users wanting a free iPhone/Macbook Pro and not wanting a tube of toothpaste or something. Hopefully this doesn’t become another method for spammers (or us) to attack the Twittersphere