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

I started my blog nearly a year ago, I decided to call it coffee and pie because I didn’t want to use my name or something that would determine what the content had to be. I went with coffee and pie because, I like coffee, I like pie and I liked how they sounded together

The reason I am thinking about my blog name is because my good friend Barry Pace started a mini experiment/ exercise the other day based on his observations regarding coffee and twitter. He decided to start retweeting any of his followers whenever they wrote a coffee related tweet. The main reasoning was his observation, that people seem to talk about coffee with such reverence on twitter.

It made me laugh because I think that Mr Pace has a very valid point. The amount of bios I read that state tea or coffee as an interest is huge. I think I even have it on my own facebook page. But why? Granted, I generally sleep 4-5 hours most night and caffeine is a big part of my life but how has something, as basic as drinking a hot drink come to say so much about a person that it is listed in our bios and interests.

Something’s happening in the Insurance world. Firstly I saw the Norwich Union/Aviva ad. That was baffling when all those American celebs bangng on about their names were in fact promoting the British insurance company Norwich Union/Aviva

Then rolls on Iggy Pop supporting Swift Cover.

And then its Direct Line featuring voiceovers from Stephen Fry and Paul Merton.

My favourite is Compare the Market/Meerkat ads though. Here is an insurance company tackling what I thought wasn’t really possible. Insurance, humour and social media. Aleksandr the Meerkat even has 3,000 friends on facebook and a growing discourse on Twitter, with 250 followers at present.

Maybe this is all me though. Now I’m working on an insurance client I am a lot more observant. Either way I need to get out more. This January drinking ban is good for the health but it would seem I am getting excited about insurance…hmm

My Twitter is pretty quiet these days. So is my mobile. The way my friends and I use Twitter has changed dramatically. This change got me thinking about why I started using it in the first place and not just Twitter but Blogging too.

You may have noticed my distinct lack of posts recently and that is mainly due to what I term as ‘Bloggers Block’ in other words I’m struggling to write anything that seems original relevant and makes any grammatical sense.
And just as this was swimming around my head I click on Chris Brogans post and realise that I finally have a subject to go on about. Thanks!

So Twitter, Plurk, Facebook , Tumblr, the list goes on. It seems like Social Media is the new Web 2.O the latest Industry buzz word but what does this mean for the platforms? Brogan makes a brilliant point. We can do our jobs, meet our friends and generally live our lives without Twitter, Facebook and the rest of those social platforms so the question I’m asking myself again and have been wondering since Twitter got oh so quiet is why do I use them?

I don’t Blog, Twitter and all that jazz because I have to its becasue I enjoy it and I like finding new ways to communicate, explore and expand the Webs potential. Now these tools have become the new industry buzz its inevitable that more and more advertising campaigns will adopt the ‘social’ thing I just hope that the platforms core purpose is the reason they are used instead of just because its there.

I’m pretty new to blogging and I used to be pretty pessimistic in terms of what a blog could achieve for me, more to the point, who would care what I had to say anyway.

It wasn’t until I finished my degree and started looking for a job in the industry that I realised I had a lot to say and a blog would be the perfect place for me to aggregate all my ideas.

There has been a lot of blogging about the changing face of the blogosphere paying close attention to the business model now apparent in blogging, lifestreaming replacing blogging and new media becoming like old media. My main qualms with all of these criticisms are that this changing landscape should indicate a positive change.

More people are blogging, which means more people are contributing. Isn’t this what we want online? Isn’t that what all the Web 2.0 marketing jargon we constantly hear about is striving to achieve?

It was just over a year and a half ago I wrote a 10,000 word dissertation analysing the effectiveness of blogging and how it would affect ‘digital natives’ and I must confess that although I was optimistic I personally came out of that research with a fairly bleak view. However, the more I read about the failure of blogs the more I blog, read blogs and learn the rosier my view becomes!

I love Swurl and Twitter but the primary purpose of these tools seem so different to blogging that I find it hard to believe it will ever replace it. Livestreaming is more about exciting ways to interact and communicate. It gives users the ability to publicise all or just particular aspects of their life (some may even deem it over sharing) Blogging on the other hand (to me anyway) is a way for people to express their opinion, discover new things and discuss topics with likeminded people. Isn’t it?

There will always be people who want to learn and therefore there will always be people writing and reading about new topics. Despite blogging becoming a more business type model doesn’t this indicates the exact opposite of failing? Isn’t this illustrating a larger amount of contributors than lurkers and isn’t that a good thing?

Pro-bloggers are a great source of information and learning for other bloggers, like myself (and non-bloggers) to learn more from people who are paid to do this for a living. The same way we pay a lot of money to advertisers for their expertise we look to these pro-bloggers in a similar light. However, the best thing about blogging and what will always set it apart from old media; the possibility it offers anybody to disagree publicly, And it be okay.