There are plenty of examples out there regarding customer service on the social channels that are good. Companies using their own customer service departments to monitor tweets and public Facebook posts or posts to pages that actually get handled. However, this falls apart for many companies that outsource their social networking channels as well as their customer service departments.

Social Network service can be ruined by having a marketing agency handle replying to reviews and postings without a direct tie to the company they are servicing. This leads to complaints falling on people that have no real power to help the customer having issues. I’ve complained about Comcast in the past regarding service issues, but their Twitter team is actually employees in the customer service department. Which means that they can listen and actually help fix issues.

My latest issue was with TMobile’s Twitter team. I had an issue lately with my bill after combining my wife’s and my accounts into one bill and contract. I was switching from unlimited text messaging my own account and 1000 message limits on my wife’s account (which she consistently used under 100). Because of the switch the messages that she and I had sent out since the last bill were thrown into a limbo state that their billing system thought was overage use. I got charged $45.20 + tax for the overage. The bill I got had just come through and wasn’t due to be auto-paid for another 20 days. I called in.

This is where the Service Theater idea comes in with outsourced customer service departments. The poor CS rep that I spoke to couldn’t do anything to help me. She told me that the money would be credited back to my account in the next billing cycle (March). I told her that what she was suggesting was ridiculous and that I would like to speak to a supervisor. She put me on hold for a few minutes to go check to see if a supervisor was available. Once she came back, she told me that all the supervisors were busy helping other customers and that it didn’t really matter since the supervisor wouldn’t be able to help me with anything either.

I don’t fault the CS Rep for any of this. Her hands were tied in regards with what she had permission to do. The calls are so scripted that delving off into uncharted territory leaves the agents unable to handle slightly different from the script. I wouldn’t even be surprised that the “my supervisor wouldn’t be able to help you” comment is on a script for ornery customers (which I was).

The last part of service theater was the twitter team. I’ve complemented Tmobile on their service before, and did so when I switched Megan and I to the same plan because we were saving money. They were very quick to respond on Twitter and always have been. However, when I complained about the bill I got silence. When I complained about the silence, I got silence. When the matter was resolved and I tweeted about it again, I got a reply that they were happy that it was resolved. When I questioned them on the fact they hadn’t replied to any of my complaint tweets I was told that they can’t respond to every one. I’m translating this to: We can’t do anything if you complain anyways, so we just don’t reply.

Luckily this whole thing had a good ending. My account isn’t going to get charged the extra $45.00.

Megan and I went shopping this past Saturday to get some things that we needed for ourselves and for our upcoming trip to Hawaii. Megan gets a lot of coupons and offers from JC Penney so we decided that we’d head there first and check out their sale and see if there were some things we liked.

As I normally do, I checked in on Foursquare. I was surprised to see a check-in special from the store for $10 off a $50 purchase. I wanted to try it out at the register so I kept the screen up on my phone waiting for checkout.

After browsing and picking out items for a while we got to the register. I showed the cashier the phone with the screen and her face went blank. I’ve seen that look before. It’s the “WTF did you show me?” look. Her verbal response was “usually mobile coupons have barcodes”. Argh.

I noticed there was a code of some sort on the deal and gave the cashier the code. Nothing happened. It was at that point I noticed a tiny bit.ly link in the text on the deal (a non-custom one). I tried to click on it… nada, copy the text… nada. Once I had it memorized to enter in my phone’s browser it was then that I noticed that my phone actually had no reception.

Gave up at that point. Went out to the car and tweeted about it. Yesterday I got a reply from the official JC Penney twitter account that I should email them about the situation.

I did.

They replied today with an update that not only had they contacted the store manager to provide information so that cashiers could be trained for foursquare specials. They also shared my email with their mobile marketing and digital media teams for review.

They also asked for my mailing address so that they could send me a $25.00 merchandise certificate. The fact that the foursquare deal is $10 off a $50 purchase means I win!

Here’s the deal with this. I didn’t really expect a response (one of the reasons I didn’t use their handle in my original tweet). Also, I never actually expected to get anything out of this. Knowing that someone was listening and that they passed my email on was good enough for me… but 25 bucks is 25 bucks.

So, thank you to whomever from the JC Penney CS team for listening.

For the past many visits to Target, Home Depot, and Menards (who knows how many) Megan and I have needed to pick up a furnace filter. Yet every time we go to one of those three places I/We forget to get a furnace filter.

We remember when we get home, but it never makes it on a list.

Enter Foursquare. Since I’m opening that app before I walk in the store, I’m also checking into it and looking to see if I’m mayor yet. Because of that fact, the best time to remind to grab something at a place I just checked into is right then. Not the random note floating in my wallet, not the guilt I feel when I get home and am filterless. But when I walk into the store.

This would also have side benefits for Foursquare. The people that would start using these Reminders would more likely be checking in when they get to a location than when they leave (which I used to be guilty of).

I thought about suggesting a Foursquare App that would send an email or something if it noticed you checked in somewhere, but that’s a disjointed process and may be too much for people.

So, Foursquare Proper, do me a solid, and let me remind myself to do things when I get somewhere (and make it so that I can keep it private if I choose to do so).

I use Google Reader. It’s convenient, I’m constantly in Google stuff throughout the day anyways, and so far it’s the best reader out there (because it doesn’t try to guess what I want to read). However, I have been reading more and more of my feeds on my phone.

There’s one simple reason for this: “Mark Previous As Read”.

I don’t read every single item in my feed. I’ve found that this leads to “Unread Bankruptcy” where I mark all as read and start over again. I’m generally okay with being a few days late to comment or to read something. This means that as I’m scrolling through my “sort by oldest” feed view I’m marking previous as read since obviously the title wasn’t interesting enough to read (or in the case of some of the tech news blogs I’m subscribed to that the title is descriptive enough to not have to read).

I would definitely be reading more in my browser with this feature, but with the ability to share to Google+ in the browser it keeps me coming back, except I usually end up starring items on my phone and then sharing it via G+ in the browser. Seems like there could be better way to do this on my phone since Mobile is so important to everyone right now.

I’ve been using G+ since I got an invite a few weeks after its beta launched. I do enjoy using the service right now, but there’s a few things that I’d like to see that would make it easier to call home. I know that it’s still a beta work in progress, but with a few of the tie-ins that Google has produced (chrome +1 button, +1 on search) it seems that there’s something missing.

Chrome +1 button

Google released this last week and you can download it here (assuming you’re using the Chrome browser). I like the plugin, but it didn’t do nearly as much as I thought it would. Basically, it puts any page you +1 into your +1 tab on your Google+ profile. What I really would have liked to see is the ability to share that page as well. Or have the +1 page announced on my stream.

+1 Tab

Speaking of the +1 Tab; There’s no way to go into that tab and share items to your stream with commentary at this point. This is absolutely horrible as I have to copy the link to the content and then go back to my stream and share the link through there.

Mobile Sharing

While it’s possible to share a post with your stream from your phone by going into the post page and selecting the “…” button to share this post. not having the buttons available on that same page make some people think that they can’t share from the mobile app. The same goes for the +1 ability of a post. You have to follow the same steps to +1 any post. From a user experience point of view, this may actually make the most sense since some G+ posts are lengthy enough that they’ll take up more than the screen of your phone and clicking into the post to take action may be the best way to go. However, even using a contextual menu on the posts would make the sharing/+1 process faster on phones.

I’m going to continually update this post as I see more that I’d like to see. Here’s my Google Plus profile.

—–

Want to see me write about something random? I’ll consider all suggestions. Go here to suggest a topic for me

Thanks to Jeff Sauer, I received a Google+ invite last night. Obviously I was excited about this after seeing the demo on Tuesday. There aren’t as many obvious areas for them to fix up as I thought there would be, but it’s definitely a beta product for the time being, but still pretty freakin’ cool.

XKCD probably said it best with their take on the release:

It really is almost like Facebook but there are a few key differences that may actually matter.

Circles

The basic premise is that you sort your contacts into Circles. Not unlike friend circles that you have in real life. Google isn’t far off in the idea that you share certain things about your life with certain people and with the exception of big announcements you don’t stray too far from those rules.

These Circles are the key divider in Plus that help format the rest of the site. They also seem to act as your self-made privacy filters. This is the key point, in my mind, that differentiates this service from Facebook. You’re not restricted to Friends, Friends of Friends, Network, etc. The service by default has it set to share to your circles & public (for now) but like labeling an email in Gmail thats how you select what circles your message should go out to.

Huddles & Hangouts

Tying into circles are two ways other ways of communicating with the people in them besides sharing links and status updates.

Huddles are a way for you to have a group chat that can also be carried over to your mobile device for further chatting (think of it as iMessage with a browser version and with multiple people seeing the messages at the same time and being able to respond).

Hangouts are the video chat equivalent to Huddles. You can have 10 people at a time in a room together. I haven’t tried it yet but there are a few examples out there that state that the service tries to make the person who’s currently talking take center stage in the room by making their video bigger. Also cool is that you can queue up videos for the group to watch as you discuss around it. I have a feeling there’ll be some MST3K like videos on Youtube soon which also means that you could queue up a MST3K youtube video and provide commentary on top of it.

Mobile & Instant Upload

I think this may be the key killer feature for the service. Google was good at maps and places on the map before foursquare even launched. Which means that their database is most likely much more detailed than the other services that offer local checkins.

I’m actually impressed with the mobile application. Even though it looks somewhat similar to Facebook’s Android app it functions a lot better (and doesn’t require nearly as many visits to the browser). Even though you can’t tag photos in the app yet, I’m sure that’s coming at some point.

When you install the mobile app you can apply Instant Uploads for images and videos that you take with your Android phone. When I initially heard about this and saw the demo I was a bit wary of it because I take some pretty blurry pictures sometimes and I didn’t necessarily want those uploaded to Plus immediately.

However the powers that be at Google made a good decision where instant uploads go into a private, only you, album first so that you can choose which albums those pictures will reside in. That is a win in my book. Convenience plus privacy at the same time.

Sparks

Google is amazing at finding relevant results when you search. They incorporated this into plus by adding a module called “Sparks”. I’m wondering how this module will evolve. I kind of want it to be the social version of Google Alerts where you could see how many new results have shown up, but this may not be feasible since if someone Sparks “Entertainment” they’ll be inundated with results constantly.

Photos, Status Updates, and Sharing

While I was a little bit disappointed that my photos would be moved into Picasa it seems like it’s a double duty type thing where not only are the photos up on Picasa but they are also on Plus (which means you don’t necessarily need to worry about storage limits, yay!)

The photo editing capabilities are pretty sweet as well. Allowing you to fix issues with photos that you upload.



Final Thoughts

When I showed Megan the service last night she totally got the Circles concept immediately and looked forward to being able to use something like it. She may even be an early adopter but the lack of friends on the service could keep her away for a while as well.

And as Jessica Gottlieb put it today on plus:

Oh thank gawd I didn’t work hard to create content for Tumblr.

I was recently introduced to Turntable.FM by my coworkers. It started out by some of us going into a room that was specially made to be a good soundtrack to code to.

As more of us got onto the service which is in beta right now I started to actually want to find music that my friends/coworkers would also like to hear.

I’ve been pretty distant from the new non-mainstream music area for pretty much the last 10 years. Because of this it’s been really hard for me to get back into the discovery part of music. I’m quite lucky to have some coworkers that are very much into the discovery part and share their finds on the service.

This service is looking to actually increase my interest in music that doesn’t necessarily make it onto my Pandora playlist due to it being unlike other things that I’ve marked as liking there.

Update: You need to unblock flash on the page otherwise the music won’t play

For those that don’t know how the service works it’s actually pretty easy. When you start into the service you’re immediately a DJ and can start playing the music that you upload or search the already uploaded area. When you join a room there are five DJ spinners that you can start playing your music from.

As you play music from your playlist (make sure to continually update it if you’re spinning otherwise you’ll start looping) other DJs in the room have the chance to give the song you choose a rating of “Awesome” or “Lame”. As you gather Awesome ratings you get DJ Points. The more points you get the better looking avatars that you can choose from.

You can also become a fan of another DJ. When you do you’ll get notifications (via email but you can change that) when that person starts spinning in a room. I’ve chosen to keep the notifications on at this point due to the fact that they really aren’t that annoying and I’m enjoying using this service.

So head over to turntable.fm and make sure to fan @iamdez. If you’re a friend of mine on Facebook you’ll be able to get in without a specific invite.

… and all of them pretty much suck.

Either they give you a number that you can’t really verify (secret algorithms and all) or the information the display is veritably wrong.

Take the site that @sornie79 tweeted earlier today regarding websitegrader.com. After running my report I learned that the way I write can be understood by elementary/middle school level readers (part of me is happy about this). But what I found as kind of ridiculous was the twitter section of the grade.

Having worked with the Twitter API before I know that it is a really REALLY easy call to get the correct stats for someone. And for the details they were getting they don’t even need OAuth credentials to do it.

We’ve all been through the Twifficiency times when numbers are just spat out without any real context. Sports are weird like that too, 99-75 in an NBA game means something completely different than comparing the scores of two different golfers. Only with context can someone figure out what the final number mean.

One of my favorite sites to pick on is Klout. For those that don’t know, this site takes your Twitter activity, the activity of the people that follow you in context to your activity, the topics you tweet about, and in some cases the same things for Facebook (if you connect your Facebook account to it); then they mash all that up and spit out a number. Since they made all the algorithms themselves they keep them close to their chest (which is fine) but the sentence they normally give. I’m just going to pick on their “True Reach” statistic for now. It’s described as:

True Reach is the size of your engaged audience, eliminating inactive and spam accounts. Klout calculates influence for each individual relationship. For example, if you are followed by a person who follows 5,000 other people and you have never interacted with this person, share very few common friends, and generally don’t tweet about the same topics, it’s likely that the your tweets are barely seen by this person, and you probably have little to no influence over them. On the other hand, if a person takes the time to put the user on a Twitter list, it means they really value the content the user produces, and will increase the influence the user has over them.

Kind of makes sense, but how do they determine an inactive account or for that matter a spam account? I usually require a lot of information to quench my brain

However, even though I dump on Klout they’re doing well for themselves by offering deals to people with higher Klout scores and most likely their getting paid to do so. Good on them, I still wish you’d provide better context or give number like examples of accounts.

Instead of going on with other services that I’m disappointed in I’ll just say this. If you’re a regular person using these services your ratings shouldn’t matter. If you like using the services, just keep doing what you’re doing. Keep up on reading about changes that the services make and use them to your advantage.

If you’re a brand, measure your success/failure against verifiable sources. How many customers did this site bring into the store, to your site. How many more people visited your site based on what/how/when you tweeted or updated Facebook. What kind of demographics do you have for your site accounts (Facebook is easy to gather that, Twitter not so much).

If you’re like me and am somewhere in the middle. Continue complaining… that’s what we all do best. Just remember that the squeaky wheel gets the grease. Oh, and visit Bill’s site. He likes it when people do, and in regards to statistics, referrals, and tracking from sources he’s one of the best I know (even though his site isn’t at all relevant to the topic of this post, his skillz are).

Just like Facebook Like buttons, Twitter introduced the Follow button today. You can see the follow button on the right side of my site. If you’re signed into Twitter and already following me you’ll just see a checkmark, if neither signed in or following you’ll see a follow button. If pressed (and you’re signed in) you’ll start following me immediately.

<iframe allowtransparency="true" frameborder="0" scrolling="no"
src="http://platform.twitter.com/widgets/follow_button.html?screen_name=iamdez" 
style="width:300px; height:20px;"></iframe>

The instructions and code they give on the followbutton page don’t give you the nicely stylized button. However, if you view the documentation page you can find the iframe version of the button which is what I’ve pasted above. The documentation page gives an easier way of adding the button to your site.

If you do copy/paste the code from above, make sure to change the screen_name variable unless you want people to follow me from your page, which is cool, but not necessary.

I hit zero unread items today in Google Reader (shocking, I know) but the way that they go about building your recommendations is pretty freaking sweet.

Click to see the full image

Text:

These are items from the Internet that you might enjoy. Hit the smiley face at the bottom of items that you like — we’ll customize your list to help you discover even more stuff.

Awesome. And the stuff in that list was pretty much all marked with a smiley face by the time I got through it.

If you have a bunch of images that you’d like to have somewhere else besides just TwitPic here’s a tool that you can use: http://posterous.com/switch/twitpic/

The latter part of the steps involve uploading the images to a posterous account, but that part isn’t required. Just make sure you click the “Archive my photos…” button in the Download Photos step and save them right to your own machine.

This can be very helpful if you’re a bit peeved at the latest of Twitpic’s Terms of Service changes.

I’m moving off the TwitPic platform (for the above and a few other reasons) and most likely I’ll be using a combination of Flickr & Posterous for my quick post images with Flickr being used to host the images that I use in blog posts as well.

In what has been my single most replied to tweet I asked people to fill in the blank this morning for the all important Duck, Duck, ______.

Obviously the correct answer is Grey Duck. I got some random spottings of Goose, but I’m pretty sure those people were just trying to fake out the results of the impromptu survey.

The inspiration for this question came from Clockwork while we were having the first, of hopefully many, outdoor status meetings, where we got into the discussion afterwards while sitting in a circle.

The use is definitely regional as pointed out in the Duck, Duck, Goose Wikipedia article. Apparently it isn’t even all of Minnesota as Angie pointed out

I’m from northern Minnesota and we called it Duck, Duck, Goose.

Either way you say it, take a look at that Wikipedia article at the Extreme Duck, Duck, Goose Grey Duck section. There’s tackling involved!

This variant is played the same as regular duck duck goose, except in how the goose and picker try to get back to the empty spot. Instead of the goose chasing after the picker, he or she goes the opposite way and tries to intercept the picker on the other side of the circle. Physical contact is allowed (but not required); this usually involves wrestling and soft tackling. Throwing of limbs or fists is never allowed, the intent is always to only temporarily slow down your opponent so you can be first back to the empty spot. This version is also sometimes referred to as Yak Yak Moose.

Regardless of your feelings at least this is a less silly version of what Wisconsiners call water fountains… bubblers, sersiously… they don’t even bubble.

Are you a goose or a grey duck?

When Twitter launced in 2006 with the first tweet “Just setting up my twttr”; no one knew it would change the way we communicate online.

The reason for 140 characters was due to the length of SMS Text messages. Text messages are allowed 160 characters.

Usernames are limited to 20 characters. This allows you to send a direct message to someone using 140 full characters and not go over 160.

This post isn’t going to be about Twitter. It’s more about how we adapted our way of expressing ourselves to fit the 140 character limit.

Blogs have been around for over 10 years now and don’t limit the writer, but how do you limit a cohesive thought in 140 characters?

Concise thought has been around for ages. In fact bible verses average 25 words and around 140 characters a piece. http://bit.ly/h5wzGX

But why the obsession now with fitting our thoughts into small bite-sized pieces of information? I’d argue it’s about keeping attention.

Books, magazine articles, blogs posts and other forms of writing aren’t limited but they contain smaller snippets of thoughts combined.

A single update from me gives you insight to what I’m thinking right now but looking at my history gives you a look at more of my whole.

I’ve been suprised to find myself thinking bigger within this smaller space. How do I get my entire point across in this limited space?

One obvious answer is to write a blog post on it and then send the link to the person I’m replying to. However, I’m not that long-winded.

Another answer is to shorten your words to something recognizable. Some examples of this can be found here: http://bit.ly/hefgS8

The better answer, in my opinion, is more efficient word usage. Shortening your words alienates a possibly large portion of your audience.

I’ve started to notice that my ability to think/write in 140 characters has started to affect other aspects of my life positively as well.

I used to pride myself on my ability to spit out a lot of words into an email and get my point across. Now I find my emails more concise.

However, this has improved my oral communication as well. I used to beat around the bush a lot more. I now find myself quicker to the point.

I leave out unneccessary words from my sentences when I find my post limit reached before the end of my current thought.

I respect writers that can make an art out of the written word using flowing and descriptive sentences, but that’s a different topic.

When I’m working or crunched on time I prefer a quicker read through my stream. Both on Facebook and Twitter.

Links clicked on by me are usually preceded by a quick opinion by the sharer. Links with just the titles of the post, not so much.

The best conversations I’ve had online and off are filled with quick wit and opinion that doesn’t require a speechwriter.

That said, I’m not against having a long conversation with a lot of thoughts, but the conversation needs to be more even for both sides.

As I get better with concise thought I find that I have more room left at the end to get a little bit more desecriptive.

One last thing that a limit helps: listening. If I can express myself written and verbally in shorter bites, I have more time to listen.

This post is cross-posted at Clockwork’s Blog

If you’ve ever had someone gain unauthorized access to your online accounts, you know how frustrating it is. Not only do you have to reset your password for that account, you also have to reset all the other accounts that use the same password (even though you’ve been told a million times not to do that).

Enter OAuth

To solve this problem, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Gmail, Google Analytics, Google Apps, and many others use OAuth to allow users to keep their passwords and core account information away from applications built for those platforms. OAuth describes it in this way (I also wrote a more in-depth post about OAuth):

“Many luxury cars today come with a valet key. It is a special key you give the parking attendant and unlike your regular key, will not allow the car to drive more than a mile or two. Some valet keys will not open the trunk, while others will block access to your onboard cell phone address book. Regardless of what restrictions the valet key imposes, the idea is very clever. You give someone limited access to your car with a special key, while using your regular key to unlock everything.”

For sites like Twitter, using OAuth means that applications like Tweetdeck can connect to your account and access a wide range of options but cannot change your username, password, email address or phone number. Once connected to your Twitter account via OAuth, Tweetdeck can do many things (tweet, re-tweet, @ reply, DM, search, etc.) — but it can’t change important account settings. Tweetdeck never gets your Twitter password.

For the majority of us, this is a great setup. We keep our password secure by not sharing it with every app that needs access, and we can change our password and not have to reauthorize every app that we use.

The Backdoor is Open

But those of us that have our accounts broken into aren’t as lucky. Changing your password may not be enough after a break-in. The benefit of OAuth becomes a hidden-in-plain-sight back door into your account if the attacker attached any app to your account. While your core information is secure, and the password you have set up is no longer known to the attacker, your account can still have its status updated, posts deleted, direct messages read/sent/deleted via these authorized applications.

Get it? Because you’ve changed your password, the attacker can’t access your account directly anymore, but — if they’ve attached apps to your account — they may still be able to access your account via those authorized apps. Crazy, right?!

This is extremely important for companies and brands since brand image can be deeply affected by not only accidental tweets by authorized users, but can be even more damaged by intentional tweets from unauthorized users.

What to Do

If you’re changing your password due to a break-in, you should also revoke the access of all apps that are connected to your account. Below is a list of commonly used sites that use OAuth for application access to the service. The link is to the OAuth listing for each of the sites.

• Facebook
• Twitter
• Google Accounts (this is for all Google services)
• LinkedIn
• Flickr
• Myspace
• Yahoo
• Netflix

Even if you don’t think your account has been accessed, it’s a good idea to check your accounts on a regular basis and revoke access to any apps that you no longer use, or don’t recognize. Ever seen weird status updates on your friends’ Facebook pages? Often, it’s because their account has been breached because they unwittingly gave access to a shady application. While Facebook tries to police this kind of thing, the best defense is a good offense.

Recap

• OAuth is awesome!
• Check your accounts regularly and prune applications to prevent account breaches.
• If your account has been breached you should read this article about handling OAuth access with breached accounts
• If your account has been broken into, change your password and revoke access to applications. Then, go back and re-authorize apps that you want to use.

I noticed today a new option in my Account dropdown on Facebook. “Use Facebook As Page” now appeared. The feature looks to be a few months old, but this is the first I’ve noticed it. Probably due to Facebook’s feature testing procedure by slowly rolling out features to its userbase over time rather than all at once.

What it allows you to do is browse through Facebook from the viewpoint of your page. You newsfeed is populated by your page’s favorite pages.

It also allows you to use your page to comment on other pages as your own page (instead of yourself). Apparently spammer’s like this (but they pretty much like any feature that isn’t anti-spam).

Spam and moderation settings are still in place for both People and Pages that decide to try and spam your page.

You cannot send messages as a page to anyone, and the messages button is gone from the top. The friends and notifications that you receive are for the page you are currently signed in with. Meaning that your new likes will show up as friend requests and when anyone writes, comments, or likes a post the notifications will show up in the top.

You can always switch back to yourself by using your account drop-down again, but this is somewhat cool to be able to do and should be somewhat of a jumpstart for pages with things in common (like partnerships or company ties) to be able to cross-post messages.