Twitter makes it easier to be human

Twitter has announced it is trialling a new business tool. It should mean an end to faceless accounts such as @brandX.

Instead the same account can share multiple users. Multiple human users.
And when a different human being 'takes the helm' you'll know so, and what they tweet will be individually ascribed against that particular human.

So where @btcare currently has to update their profile to tell you which human you are connecting with, now the metadata with each tweet reflect its use by each individual human.

Now, not every business is going to go for this. Can't imagine the multiple heavy users at Zappos or Dell turning in their IDs, for example.

But a lot will. And what I think is truly wonderful here is that with this tool Twitter says loudly and unequivically that Twitter is a human, person-to-person environment where broadcasting your brand = fail.

It's a breadcrumb trail for those orgs who would otherwise default to voice-of-the-brand blandness.

They are led by the nose toward finding out what Twitter is all about. And in doing so they just may discover the principles of this human way, this better way of being part of the lives of their communities of users.

"It's up to business to accomodate itself to (the human shape) of twitter, not for twitter to accomodate itself to business," as @stephenfry put it at #140conf

One small experimental step. A giant leap for businesskind.

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This is not just a Christmas rant... It's an M&S Christmas rant

Image via Wikipedia

I've just sent this to Marks & Spencer on one of those dreadful 'contact us' forms. No copy for my records generated by one of those things, of course. And I always worry they disappear into the bucket of zero response.

So I've grabbed it to paste here.

This is how it reads:

Please forward this to Stuart Rose (or Marc Bolland if he's in place yet)

I would appreciate a rapid acknowledgement of receipt because I hate forms like this (see the m&s site 'contact us' section) as a way to connect with any org.

I hate drop-down menus of subjects my email is meant to correspond to and I hate not knowing who I am addressing.

No doubt your IT people thought it a wise way to reduce spam.
It also reduces interaction with your customer. It is slow and not mobile-friendly (I am writing this at the point of inspiration - on my iPhone). You have made this harder than it need be and therefore retrict the flow of hugely valuable customer insight.

Clue: your IT department don't like volume. Turn them, not your customer away.

This kind of email 'form' also fails as I don't get a copy of my initial comms AND it discourages conversational dialogue and encourages lengthy missives more broadcast in nature (cite this very email!)

But I'm not emailing about this form, I'm emailing about your lost commercial opportunity revealed by my ordering Christmas Dinner from your company today.

To order, the customer can go online. But they can only print out the order form. Which must then be filled in by hand and taken to a participating M&S store.
Where it is then painstakingly transferred by a member of staff into your own computers. Taking a good 5 mins.
Why not allow the order process, complete with the taking of your 20% deposit, online? You could also book your pickup slot online (instead of this being scrawled on paper in the store).

So that would save you and your customers time. It would therefore extend the reach of each store ( and you closed our nearest one).

While I'll acknowledge that forcing me to visit your store to make the booking in person today resulted in the sale of a sandwich, I guess you'd beat the small profit on that by increasing the number of people who would order if they didn't have to/couldn't make the additional trip to the store.

But here's the one that blows my mind. You have the opportunity here to match supply to demand more perfectly than ever. Yet you limit the number of people you are willing to gain this perfect knowledge from by limiting the amount of 'pick up slots'.

That's crazy. Not only does each order mean 20% of the transaction in the bank in advance, it also means you could staff up to meet the precise predicted demand on pick up days.

So that's my bit of customer feedback for you. My bit. Imagine if you opened up your feedback channels to learn from everyone transacting with you, in real time, on their time, through their chosen channels, at their point of inspiration.

And when the penny drops, well let's talk: ninety10group.com

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A powerful tool for the real-time age

Remember that a-tissue Twitter-powered hayfever map that Kleenex did?

Yesterday I was kicking around an idea to track expressed activity in a mash-up of Twitter and googlemaps.
And I'm starting to wonder if there is a solution to the 'social media monitoring' problem I identified at last month's Monitoring Social Media buried somewhere in functionality like this.

My contention was that current monitoring tech gives us snap shots which we can the examine under the microscope. A boon in developing a strategy based on where people WERE talking about you, in what ways and in what parts of the social media toolset.

But what we increasingly need for the real-time web is a video version - because the peer-to-peer interaction of the Internet is more flock than rational in it's nature.

Past recorded behaviour is not necessarily a predictor of future interaction.

Put another way, we're trying to drive using the rear-view mirrors.

We need real time - to know that the flock is moving, at what speed, at what rate of change of speed and in what direction. That may equip us to join in more effectively as part of the movement -as true amplifiers - rather than trying to turn the flock in our chosen direction. (there's a chapter in my book on our inability to dictate to flocks from the centre).

Mashing up real-time expressions of particular activities and displaying this on a map of the physical world would at least show the spread of an activity through a geolocated community (through a street, a town, a county, a nation...)

Further, this could be mapped against other activity to reveal real-time correlations.
Imagine if there was a link between the spread of unhappiness and street crime and you could see, in real time, a cloud of despair headed your way. The police could staff up - heading it off by knowing the direction it was headed in and at what speed.

Perhaps a business could better predict demand and allocate resource more efficiently as a result?

Imagine a despot could use it to put down a revolution before it got off the ground?

And imagine if you mapped this not only against the physical world, but also against the digital?

A powerful tool for the real-time age.

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Hamsters, information and the internet of things

I've been meaning to (find this and) post this ever since I saw JP Rangaswami speak at the London 140chars conference at the 02 on November 17.
JP was the reason I came back to the O2 for the afternoon session (I chaired a panel at Monitoring Social Media in the middle of the day).
He chose to spend 10 minutes talking about what it means that twitter is not a news service but an information service. And about traffic lights, the internet of things - and his family hamster.

Enjoy. And if you do, find JP as @jobsworth on twitter.



Thanks to Delymyth for shooting and sharing on Viddler.

Using + Social Media = Fail

I was at #Online09 (Online Publishing) at Olympia in London, to do a keynote in the Social Media Marketing theatre today.

I'm delighted to say (and perhaps its a sign of the times) that the room was packed - standing room only. They even stayed until the end :-)

I was kicking around what happens when you deconstruct the social media thang, into its social + media parts (I have blogged about this previously).

But I started from the perspective that the future is not digital.

When Gutenberg invented movable type (circa 1450) a new era was ushered in. Within 50 years there were 20 million books on the planet (to share among 450m people - I know there were 450m people at the time because I asked my friends on Twitter).

That's 20m in 50 years from a standing start (as described by Stephen Fry in his BBC show on Gutenberg). And that standing start included zero mass production techniques or technologies. Quite staggering.

And I wondered what the big prediction would have been in 1500 among the soothest sayers of the day. What next? More books?

Not likely is it.

Yet we keep banging on about a digital future.

1450 is also regarded as the beginning of the great age of exploration. The future was the renaissance, new forms of organisation (capitalism replacing feudalism) the destruction of the power of the old order (the Reformation across Europe). That's the effect of more books - it is what people did together with this new 'book' technology.

And right now, the future is not about new and better digital tools, or their prolifieration - it is about what we do together with them - the new self-organising future that dawns.

And that, and what businesses and organisations can do to benefit from all this, is what my keynote was about this morning.

Here's the slides - and, as always, your thoughts are welcome.

Using + Social Media = Fail

View more presentations from david cushman.

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