austinpreneur

Listening but not paying attention

I've been presenting a talk titled, "Complainers into Champions" lately that gives examples of why many companies can benefit from using social media to engage with customers and talk about their problems in public. I'm usually pushing companies to engage more, listen more, respond more.

However, I recently had a personal experience where a company was listening to social media, but wasn't really paying attention - and it cost them. A tweet that I sent was taken out of context and a big company spent hundreds, if not thousands of dollars investigating it. Bryan Menell also talked about my experience on the Dachis Group Blog.

It all started with a phone call to my cell phone. This was strange to begin with, because I use Google Voice and I don't give out my cell phone number to anyone. I was immediately suspicious and figured that it was some kind of strange solicitation. Here my best recollection of the conversation:

Caller: "Is this Joshua Baer?"

Me: "Who's calling?"

Caller: "Enrico XXXX"

Me: "Who are you with?"

Caller: "Bose Security"

Me: "What's this regarding?"

Caller: "It's a personal matter."

Me: "You're going to have to give me more information than that."

Caller: "Is this Josh? It's regarding your business selling stolen Bose headphones."

Me: "This is Josh. I'm not sure what you're referring to. What makes you think that?"

Caller: "I'm looking at a Twitter message that says, 'joshuabaer @jotto I've actually got a side business moving hot bose headphones'. Did you send that?"

 

Me: "I didn't say that. It must be some kind of mistake... Oh wait a minute. I think this was part of a joke. I was selling some used headphones on Facebook and my friend said that as a joke. I think if you look at the tweets before and after that it will be pretty obvious that its a joke."

Me: "Look, I'm a big fan of your products and just got the latest version. I was selling two old pair."

Caller: "Do you know where you purchased the two headphones?"

Me: "Not really, it was a long time ago. I probably bought them directly from you, or maybe from Amazon. Come to think of it one of them was my wife's so I have no idea where she purchased it."

Caller: "Are you sure?"

Me: "No, I just told you I'm not really sure because it was a long time ago. I was really just selling my used ones on Facebook."

Caller: "I know, we bought a pair from you."

Me: (laughing) "Are you serious? That's hilarious! So you know it wasn't stolen then."

Caller: "Well we can't verify that. I need to know where you purchased them." 

Me: "Look, I wish you the best and must admit that I'm kind of impressed that you're paying attention to Twitter, but this is a waste of your time."

Caller: "Well we're going to continue to investigate this. Is this the best number to reach you at if I have further questions?"

Then we exchanged contact info.

So basically, Bose Security was watching Twitter and took this one tweet out of context. They spent at least $165 so far (that's how much they paid me when they bought the headphones) and have spent many hours researching it, tracking down my number, calling me, etc.

If they had looked at my Twitter page and just seen the tweets sent around the same time, I think they should have been able to tell it was a joke.

 

How much did this cost Bose? At least $165. Assuming that they spend a few hours researching it, we're probably looking at hundreds of dollars if not more! 

Here is the original Facebook post in the marketplace:

 

Quick links to your company Facebook page and Twitter search

For most of my companies that I work with I've created quick links to our Facebook page as well as a Twitter search for our company. This makes it really easy to promote the pages by word of mouth (literally) or on Twitter where every character counts.

For example, if you want to go to OtherInbox's Facebook page, you can just type in facebook.otherinbox.com (or even shorter, facebook.oib.com). That link is a redirect that sends you to our Facebook fan page for OtherInbox.

To see what people are saying about OtherInbox right now, go to twitter.otherinbox.com. That link is a redirect that sends you to a pre-defined search on search.twitter.com.

Here's how to set it up for yourself.

Go to your Facebook fan page. The URL will probably look something like this:

http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=69949101476#/pages/Capital-Factory/62503086648

I don't know why Facebook does this because its unnecessary and really ugly, but you probably want to clean it up first. Look for the "/pages/" that appears the farthest to the right (it could be in there twice). Delete everything to the left of it other than "www.facebook.com".

http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=69949101476#/pages/Capital-Factory/62503086648

Now this is the nice URL to your Facebook fan page: 

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Capital-Factory/62503086648

Now all you do is set up a web redirect for a certain web page or domain name to go that URL. I like to use custom domain names because I think they are easy to remember: facebook.oib.com. However, you could also do oib.com/facebook just as easily. I use Register.com's RComExpress service to host my domains and they have a great feature where you can set up a subdomain and enter a page for it to redirect to and they take care of the rest. 

Next, I do the same thing for Twitter search and twitter.otherinbox.com. First I go to search.twitter.com and manually type in the search that finds the content that I want to show. 

For OtherInbox that is:

otherinbox OR "other inbox" OR #OIB OR oib.com OR "mr. spam" OR mrspam OR "mr spam"

which results in the URL:

http://search.twitter.com/search?q=otherinbox+OR+%22other+inbox%22+OR+%23OIB+OR+oib.com

+OR+%22mr.+spam%22+OR+mrspam+OR+%22mr%20spam%22

When I tried to put that URL into Register.com's redirect it didn't like some of the characters, so I put it into TinyURL first and put the resulting TinyURL into Register.com's redirect. But that worked fine.

It doesn't take long to set up, and I find it quite handy. I hope you do too!

Twitter is my RSS reader (and OtherInbox)

I read lots of RSS and blogs (I'll collectively refer to them as "feeds"), but I don't regularly use an RSS Reader. I've toyed around with Google Reader and with Bloglines but just never take the time to go browse them. I have some feeds bookmarked in Safari and Firefox but never take the time to look at those either.

For me, feeds can be easily grouped into three categories:

• important - I want a chance to read or ignore every post
• interesting - occasionally a post is interesting to me
• one-off - a post caught my eye, but I probably won't read that blog again

I find that I prefer to read important feeds just like they were email messages. I want to see an "Inbox" with all of the new postings in these feeds and either read or delete each one. If I don't check them for a few days a bunch pile up, I want to be able to quickly browse the list of old posts to see if I missed anything interesting. Apple's Mail.app Program has a nice feature that lets you subscribe to RSS feeds in Mail and have them show up in your Inbox just like email messages. There are also other services out there such as RSSFwd that will let you "subscribe" to an RSS feed by email. I use my OtherInbox account for this - you can set up any RSS feed to automatically get delivered to an OtherInbox Mailbox just like email messages (similar to Mail.app).

The interesting feeds and the one-off feeds come to me through Twitter. I don't actually subscribe to the feeds, rather I depend on my network of Twitter friends to post links to blogs that are of interest to me. A big part of why I follow certain people is because they post useful links. Many people log into Bloglines or Google Reader to scan for interesting posts - I just watch my Twitter feed.

What is Twitter?

I would guess that most people reading this blog have heard of Twitter, but I know many don't really understand what it is. Others are concerned about sharing so much information publicly.

I would describe Twitter as a very public, social version of online chat. Instead of just sending messages between small groups of people in a private way, the messages are all shared publicly by default. This means that anyone can go and search over the things people have been chatting about - either by searching keywords or "following" certain people they know.

Like many others, I first started using Twitter in March 2007 at the South by SouthWest Interactive festival in Austin, TX (SXSW). Between blogging, Twitter and Facebook, I have pretty much stopped sending out blast emails when I find interesting things I want to share. Instead, just post them to whatever is the most appropriate place. 

If people like the kinds of things I send out, they can easily find them or subscribe to my feeds. Short links and thoughts get posted on Twitter. More private photos and personal communications go on Facebook, and longer explanations (such as this one) go to one of my various blogs. 

This is much easier for me, and reduces the email overload on everyone else. Plus I get the "social effects" of using public tools and inviting unexpected responses and synergies (more on this later).

One of the best descriptions I've seen of Twitter is from Common Craft: