I’ve long thought of First Capital Connect’s ‘thamselink’ service as the train line that time forgot. So I was quite surprised earlier this year when they launched a potentially great Twitter service, promising that, if you tell them where you travel to and from, they will direct tweet service announcements that affect your journey.
The direct tweets generate and email and a text message to give me more-or-less instant notification of problems, so I can plan around them. This is a great customer service/marketing promise… I signed up.
I’ve since had all kinds of updates about stuff happening at opposite ends of their service, on trains that have no connection with my own little branch line. Oh well, you come to expect disappointment from train services I guess. Not the end of the world, just somewhat spammy.
This week, I’ve tried to use their trains on four separate occasions, only to discover that, for reasons that have gone unexplained (unexpected autumn leaf falls?), they have been unable to offer trains. Or, it seems, notifications on their twitter feed.
I’d never seek to discourage organisations from trying new things to improve their customer service or perception – and I strongly believe that the types of service messages First Capital Connect promised show enormous promise.
But if you make a promise, you have to keep it.
My frustration at the cancelled trains is severely compounded by the failure of the train company to keep their notification promise. I’d not have like the cancellation anyway, but would have been impressed with their ability to advise me ahead of time and therfore allow me to make other plans.
In the language of tweets, #fail
*===* UPDATE *===*
(no) more trains?
(12th November, noon) – I’ve found out why First Capital Connect are in such a bad way: they’re suffering from industrial action. They’ve even devised a new timetable. They just haven’t bothered to tell any of their twitter followers (to my knowledge) about this. Genius.
Oh – and it turns out compensation can be claimed at their website. Maybe that’s why they’re not telling anyone?
Broad's career takes off
Disclosure: I’m a bit schizophrenic when it comes to nationality – I’m a Kiwi by upbringing but have lived in the UK since I was 20. In other words, this weekend, in sporting terms, was golden for me: NZ’s All Blacks beat the Australian Wallabies 18-19 in the Rugby to secure the Bledisloe Cup and England clinched the final (cricket) test match of the Ashes series to win the trophy back at the Oval.
Throughout my time in the online business world, I’ve recognised that sport is a key ‘passion centre’ driving the way that people consume media online – be it on any of the ‘three screens’ we like to talk about.
But for me, one of the key elements of this summer’s Ashes series has been the way in which Twitter has played a significant role. If I had a pound for every time I’ve read Lily Allen’s comments about cricket…
Not just that, but there have been tweets galore from various cricketers – including Graeme Swann (who got into mildly hot water when clearly tweeting while driving), James Anderson and (most controversially) Phillip Hughes, whose one and only tweet revealed that he’d been dropped from the Australian side before the news had reached the England team in more conventional fashion.
Against a backdrop where a research company derided most tweets as ‘meaningless babble’, it seems to be meaningless babble that newspapers love quoting…
More to the point, to me, it signals again that we have moved further and further away from a world where what makes it into the public domain is controlled by how interesting the comments are to real people rather than to the editors of various forms of broadcast media. Or, put another way, the ‘democratisation of the means of distribution’ of content.
Some interesting teaser campaign activity going on in London this morning – there’s a website (www.nudeinascarf.com) and a twitter account (@nudeinascarf) trying to build some excitement for something to be revealed (sic) at 3.08 pm today.
Now I don’t want to spoil all the fun, but there are pretty clear clues in the timing (and a simple DNS look up will reveal who is responsible for this).
But in an economic environment when there’s so much talk about the parlous state of car sales I’ll be very interested to hear how well this does in terms of shifting metal.
Is there a link to today’s budget announcements involved as well? £2000 to buy a new car anyone?
| 3.2 |
… but it seems that (some ways of using) Twitter might not be free for much longer..
Amid rumours that Twitter and Amazon are in talks about a potential acquisition, it seems that Twitter are considering how to charge people to use their services.
But surely there is some mistake in this piece over on Brand Republic, who quote SalesForce.com’s charging structure at $995 per month?
Maybe not: the idea is quite an interesting one. You are basically asking Twitter to scour tweets for customer comments about your company – allowing you to then respond directly (and publicly) to people who are complaining, complementing or looking for info about your business.
This reminds me a lot of the things that Jeff Jarvis talks about in his excellent book “What Would Google Do?”. He describes the fall-out from his ‘Dell Sucks’ post(s) a few years back – and the whole question around whether companies should be monitoring the buzz around their brands from blogs. (answer: yes). And lambasting the response that said: “We look but we don’t touch” given by Dell when they were asked about their approach to consumer comments on blogs.
In other words, I (for one) thoroughly welcome this idea. Who knows, maybe customer service will improve generally if companies start listening to their customers?
(I know, radical thought, isn’t it?)
| 3.2 |
Sandlines is indebted to @simon_baptist for sharing two links to blogs talking about how Twitter is making some significant revenues for other companies.
- Dell has claimed to $1m in revenue last year from Twitter alerts – makes sense to me. Kind of next-gen email alerts.
- A terrific comment on a post about Twitter’s business model: investors are saying that they can afford to take their time in finding the right model. This is not the typical situation for pre-revenue companies in the current economy, to say the least!
| 3.2 |
the price of success
I’ve been twittering on and off for a while now – trying to figure out how it fits in with all my other activities – and gradually finding it more and more interesting over time. Already this year, the buzz around the microblogging service has kicked up several gears: Stephen Fry’s often witty stream-of-consciousness has been a highlight, but I’ve been gradually seeing more and more of my friends and business contacts using it.
Links back and forth with blogs (alerting to updates), Facebook, various IM and LinkedIn status messages seem to have potential.
One of my LinkedIn connections has been using his status to advise media sales people when he is in ‘buy’ mode – I’m curious to learn how this will impact the quality of his media buys.
Twitter has also gained considerably attention in mainstream media this month: suddenly DJs on Radio 1 are talking about it incessantly.
So perhaps it is unsurprising that @gordonm’s tweet yesterday about Twitters desire to monetise their service by charging businesses for using the service in a commercial fashion was essentially a link back to the Brand Republic site.
I don’t know how many followers @gordonm has at the moment, but the suggestion of how effective this can be found in @stephenfry’s history, where his mere mention of a site can bring their servers to a standstill. Mr Fry has over 150,000 followers today.
So how long before Twitter becomes part of the marketing landscape? And how will they develop sufficient revenues so that they can improve their up-time (Twitter.com is down as I write this)?
One interesting example: on Monday my flight from Heathrow was delayed by 2 hours. I tweeted “Desperate rush to h’row this morning was futile: flight delayed 2 hrs +. Grrr.” This from my iPhone.
Almost at once I had a response from Boarding! inviting me to post details of airport to them to meet up with other stranded travellers.
It’s going to be an interesting one to watch: can Twitter do what other social networks are struggling to do and crack the social networking revenue stream conundrum? My guess is there’s a way to make it work via mobile perhaps. AFullerView evidently has some ideas as well.
Anyone else?
| 3.2 |
Maybe the whole point of twitter is that it is time-sensitive. If you feel that strongly, stop reading now.
But a colleague of mine was twittering from a conference that my company, Silverpop, staged yesterday in London. He was using his pet iPhone for the task.
Apart from showing some of the things that I’m professionally interested in, I was curious about how the twitters worked to develop a historic record of how the event worked. I’d love to hear any feedback!
| 2.5 |
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