That was a Sunday. After tweeting this, I went off to do Sunday morning things like making breakfast for the kids and watching the Andrew Marr show. Standard fare.

When I got around to catching up with some twitter replies on my Seesmic Desktop, I saw there was a response from ‘virginmedia’ to my earlier tweet. This led to a quick flurry of back and forth tweets and then an email from me. The Virgin side of the conversation is below.

How Did It Come To This?

There’s a bit of a back story which puts the rapidity of this in perspective. The cable service into my house was there when I moved here in 1996. It was run by Cable & Wireless then. Some years later it became NTL and I upgraded from a dial-up modem to broadband around the same time.

Then Virgin Media took over NTL. Around that time, I realised that I was paying for broadband speeds that I wasn’t capable of receiving. I wrote a letter (‘Disgruntled of Reigate’). No reply. I wrote again (‘Angry of Reigate’). I wrote simply because, at that time, trying to get through to a Virgin Media support desk took more will power, provisions, and patience than I could muster. Nothing happened.

Meanwhile, my ageing set-top box was starting to fizz and crackle and required frequent reboots to maintain any semblance of continuous connectivity. I phoned. I spoke to both technical and customer support departments. Both agreed I needed a modem and that I was paying for a service I wasn’t getting. An engineer arrived. And proceeded to replace the set-top box with an identical one! No modem. “Different department, mate. Sorry. I’ll put in a request for you, if you like.” I liked. But nothing happened.

The Miracle Of Action

Which is why such an immediate response to a throwaway comment is both startling and refreshing. Suddenly, there was a chance that the issue would be sorted.

And, as the final tweet in the stream above promised, sorted it was.

I am receiving a substantial refund for the months I was overpaying for faster broadband and an engineer arrives tomorrow to install/deliver a modem that will allow me to make use henceforth of the speed I’m paying for.

Twitter As A Customer Service Outpost

So, a big thank you to Alex and Sam at the Virgin Media Twitter Team (follow them on Twitter) for not only listening and responding but also taking things quickly to the next level and getting the problem resolved in a manner beyond my admittedly jaded expectations.

Does this signal a dramatic improvement in Virgin Media’s customer service as a whole? Who knows? It has certainly made a difference for me and Virgin have kept a customer that was having serious thoughts about cancelling the service.

I could be churlish and wonder about the customer service experience of all the Virgin customers who don’t use Twitter. But the fact that they have put a Twitter team in place – and given them the power to make decisions and take action quickly – indicates that someone has learned the social media lesson and that can only be good for Virgin customers as a whole going forward.

In truth, except for the twitterati waiting for delivery of their new toys, the Moonfruit campaign has caused mixed reactions – to say the least – among Twitter users. For instance, musician and Tuttler par excellence Steve Lawson suggested unfollowing anyone who used the Moonfruit hashtag. He was not alone in finding the manipulation of the hashtag service/system both distasteful and a PR failure.

Another Habitat?

Possibly not quite on the same scale as Habitat’s disastrous foray into Twitter in June (explained in this excellent post on Social Media Today) but where Habitat’s campaign had sprung from ignorance and stupidity, the Moonfruit campaign was a more deliberate attempt to game the system.

The plan for the campaign must have seemed brilliant. Choosing a MacBook Pro as a prize – and 10 of them – was guaranteed to appeal to a large section of Twitter’s core users. It also ensured the campaign got widespread coverage over and above Twitter itself. Brand Republic, for instance, had an early positive report about Moonfruit on July 1st after the first winner was announced.

Low hanging…..

But what positives did Moonfruit hope to extract from gaming a trending hashtag and gaining a small but still significant percentage of Twitter traffic? It probably seemed a good idea at the time but it’s hard to see exactly where the lead generation was meant to come. And. although the campaign was dressed up in terms of a 10th birthday celebration for the company, there must have been some ROI expectation to make it worth while to cough up for 10 MacBook Pros and their delivery. Are their likely customer base watching hashtags? If I miss out on a MacBook Pro am I more likely to get them to design my next web site?

It’s obvious Moonfruit now have doubts of their own about the value of the campaign, as evidenced by its early termination. They may feel they have lost both revenue and reputation. On the plus side, if their customer base wasn’t watching the hashtags in the first place, it’s probably also unaware of the bad feeling now associated with the campaign.

A wee confession

I tweeted. I did. I used the hashtag and hoped I would win. I spammed Twitter. Only once, though. They made me do it! Think Homer Simpson and donuts: I just had the image of a MacBook Pro in my mind. MacBook Pro, though; not Moonfruit.

Here are the four main reasons why I recently started using Bit.ly:

1. TinyURL’s declining popularity.
This may or may not be undeserved (your mileage may vary according to use) but there’s no denying that popular sentiment – driven by a combination of downtime, decaying links (linkrot), and the recent cross-site scripting attack that used TinyURL to spread its maliciousness (good explanation here) – regards TinyURL with increasing distaste.

I’ve not experienced problems with TinyURL myself but Bit.ly offers me things that TinyURL doesn’t supply off the bat.

2. Browser integration.
I use Firefox. You can install Bit.ly in your bookmarks toolbar and, when you want to shorten a site’s URL, simply click on the bookmarklet in the toolbar. Unlike TinyURL (also available to install into your Firefox bookmark toolbar), which always loaded its own page in place of the page I was viewing, Bit.ly opens a new tab and leaves me on the page I’m looking at. This seems to me to be eminently sensible.

3. Send directly to Twitter.
Better yet, when you go through to the Bit.ly page, you find that your shortened URL is sitting – along with the original page title – in a box perfectly suited for Twitter. When you register at Bit.ly, you can add your Twitter account details. The benefit of this is that you can then simply add your comment next to the shortened URL in the Bit.ly box and send it directly to Twitter. No need to cut and past the new URL into a tweet. Sweet.

4. Free stats.
Nobody likes to be ignored. Now you can see exactly how popular (or not) your suggestions for reading are among your Twitter followers. Bit.ly tracks how many clicks your shortened URLs get. This is not not simply an ego massager. For business accounts, this is a great way to test and measure where you can exert influence or show leadership. Of course, this means that the tweet relating to the shortened URL needs to be fairly explicit in defining what your followers are clicking on – which is good Twitter practice, in any case.

And, whether there is an element of ego massage or not, the stats actually encourage sharing. This has got to be a good thing. It’s great to be able to see that when you linked to the this story, people were clicking through at the rate of one a second, while this link inspired no visitors at all.

Let me know what URL shortening service you use – and why.

How is this possible? I hear you cry. Let me explain. Here are the simple steps involved:

1. Visit twtbizcard.com
2. Click the ‘Create a business card’ link
3. Fill out the details you want displayed on your card (you can edit things at any time)
4. Remember the Twitter hashtag #twtbizcard
5. To share your new card, simply @reply your intended recipient and include the memorable hashtag from step 4

When someone sends you a card, Twtapps follow up with a tweet that includes a link to where the card lives.

This all sounds quite appealing.

My test seemed to confuse the app, however. After creating a card for my primary Twitter account, I then created a second card for a client account. All seemed to proceed according to plan in both cases, as I had to connect using the correct Twitter account name and password for each card.

But when I sent the client card to my primary account, I waited and waited for the link notification. Nothing came. I got the initial @reply with the hashtag appended but then nothing from twtBizCard itself telling me where to find the card.

No time limit is specified in the instructions – and there’s no help/faq – but surely one of the key things about sharing a business card is a certain immediacy. Perhaps that’s just me but a delay in the process is a bit like coming back from a day of meetings and finding a set of cards in your pocket and then trying to remember who went with which and why you swapped cards in the first place.

Anyway, this could potentially be another step towards removing the need for any physical networking at all.

Unless you’re in a rush.

Or have a poor memory.

The FT piece quotes John Seely Brown on how Twitter ‘extends peripheral awareness’. This seems to me to be exactly how Twitter and similar social media tools need to be used by businesses. It’s too easy to get hung up on the idea that, unless you become totally committed to using the tool 24×7, it won’t generate business value. At the other end of the scale is the notion common in companies that any use of Twitter will be somehow distracting.

The idea of peripheral vision – and especially extending peripheral vision – is well known to martial artists. The key idea here is to be able to focus on a goal but be increasingly aware of what is happening around you. How you reach the goal changes according to what you perceive is happening on the periphery. Goal for a martial artist can be an opponent. For a company – well, take your pick: increased sales, product launch, survive the recession, reputation recovery.

Twitter becomes a tool – along with other peripheral vision management tools such as a blogging strategy, forums, and RSS feeds – for getting a better sense of what’s happening in your market. If it becomes a distraction, your path to your goal becomes unclear; if you ignore it, you may miss opportunities for achieving your goals more quickly and easily.

(For added interest – here’s a recording of a short talk by John Seely Brown on business ecosystems.)

This process reached its nadir in the Sunday Times, with a piece entitled ‘A load of Twitter’. There is a lot wrong with the piece, from its tone of condescension to its inability to see the very inconsistency inherent in placing an ‘ad’ for the paper’s own fashion team’s Twitter account straight afterwards. Luckily, I don’t have to list these faults in full. A much better – and extremely funny – job has been done by Google employee Kevin Marks on his personal blog. Read the Times piece and then read Kevin. Great stuff.