Henry's Blog

Posts Tagged ‘facebook’

I’ve been delaying writing this blog for months, partially because I’m a bit worried it’s going to be a mammoth one, but mainly because I was hoping all these issues would have been resolved by now. I’m finally biting the bullet and writing it now though, inspired by the positive response I got from 1 of these 4 companies. I’d normally write this sort of subject up on the Tamar blog, but since these are all starkly my own opinions (and in some cases I may get a little snipey) I thought it safest to write it here… So here’s the low-down, as I believe the kids on the street (don’t) say:

Company: The Google Store (run in the UK by ‘Merchandise Mania’)
What I paid for: A bunch of Google branded merchandise – a baby-gro (which will no longer fit, if it ever arrives), a cool USB laser-pointer thingy, plus a few other bits.
What I got: Nothing. Zip. Zilch. Ordered on September 3rd 2010, still no merchandise.
What happened when I complained: I’ve sent numerous e-mails, submitted an enquiry on the website and tweeted about it a few times, but if I’m remembering correctly I’ve never even had a reply. To be fair to Google here, the store is operated by different companies around the world, so I suppose this is more the merchandiser’s problem, but I would have hoped Google might have kept a closer tab on complaints and issues.

Company: Lastminute.com
What I paid for: I booked a stay at the Custom House hotel for the night of Kevin Smith’s big O2 gig, which I had tickets for. Didn’t break the bank, but I spent a bit more than I could have as I thought I might as well stay somewhere nice for my “evening out”…
What I got: Upon arriving for a pre-gig check-in, I was told that due to some error they didn’t explain, I had been moved to an “equivalent hotel” – the Ibis “over the road”. After walking the 20-minute walk to the Ibis, I checked in to the crappy Ibis. I should point out at this point that the reason I chose Custom House was for 4 specific reasons: It’s closeness to the DLR station – walking around the Docklands late at night is not a fun prospect; It’s promised facilities, including “On-demand HD movies”; High-speed internet access; Room service – perfect for the post-gig dinner. The Ibis had NONE of these features – the TV barely even picked up ITV, and I had to eat my dinner in reception!
What happened when I complained: My initial query was ignored for a few days, and only when I tweeted about it did I get a proper response. The customer service lady kept phoning me at the office, despite my plea to deal with it over e-mail – a classic technique to get me to accept a cobbled apology and move on. The gist of the initial “resolution” was that the Ibis disagreed, so tough shit (I’m paraphrasing). I didn’t give up at that, so after they’d made more enquiries and ignored my e-mails for weeks on end, they eventually gave me a £20 partial refund, basically to shut me up…. I was massively disappointed by this, especially from a company who seem to pride themselves on their great use of social media and their super customer support. And don’t even start me on the next time I used them – I’ll save that for another day, but needless to say I lost the £20 I got refunded!

Company: RockYou, the Facebook app developers
What I paid for: Wanting to see what this game was like, I started playing “Zoo World” for a few days, before seeing what I’d get for a tenner. Being a long-time Packrat player, I’ve always been very impressed with what you get from Alamofire when you pay for credits in their game, so I thought I’d give this app a go. I used PayPal to buy a $20 pack of ‘wildlife points’ – points you can use within the game.
What I got: What I paid for.. at first. It has since disappeared!
What happened when I complained: Despite being the biggest app developer on Facebook, raking in millions of dollars a year, Rockyou have utterly shit customer support. I’ve complained about the disappearance of my “credits” on their offsite forum, their Facebook fan page AND the main RockYou website, but haven’t received a single reply. The bastards… :D

The silver-lining after all this cloud….

Company: Coca Cola – cokezone
What I paid for: I’ve been religiously collecting CokeZone points for almost a year, with the aim of getting one of the magazine subscriptions you can swap them for – namely, Empire. Having collected 250 points, I claimed my subscription in late November 2009…
What I got: As of last week, my “rewards” page was still listing the subscription as being “processed” – almost 2 months later….
What happened when I complained: I made enquiries through the CokeZone website, to little avail, when I decided to try Tweeting both @EmpireMagazine and @CocaCola about the problem. Both replied within 20 minutes, with Coke passing me the e-mail of a person who very quickly solved the issue. Not only did they get the subscription (hopefully) sorted, they also refunded me the 250 points as an apology. What a nice gesture!

There you go, I told you it would be a bit of a mammoth post….! :D

As I’ve just discovered that I can post blogs from my Blackberry, I thought I’d take this opportunity (I.e. A very dull train journey to work) to jot down some of my online aims for 2010. I know what you’re thinking – dull, Dull, DULL! I think the same every time I spot a “10 greatest blah in 2009″ list on Twitter, so I don’t blame you at all if you skip this. But I reckon that by writing it down in a public forum, I might just have a chance of sticking to some of these…

Consolidate my efforts…

Having been doing internetty stuff for over 15 years now, I’ve collected quite a few different sites, projects and profiles along the way. Just as I think it will be for the internet as a whole, I’m going to aim to consolidate and reduce the amount of different places I ‘reside’ in 2010 – or at the very least try to reduce duplication and confusion.

Just off the top of my head I can list social networks I belong to (Facebook, Bebo, Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace, FriendFeed, Yammer, Flickr, YouTube, Vimeo, Google and Plaxo), websites I build/maintain (Melissa George, Elize du Toit, this one, My New York Wedding site, Our First Flat, Scilly Holiday), Projects I’ve started up (My social mash-up friend map, My family tree site, …) And many others I’ve probably forgotten. And that’s before I even start thinking about the sites I work on/with at Tamar. It’s a lot to remember! So I’m hoping to consolidate that down a bit… I think I’m going to start by closing my MySpace and Bebo accounts, since I haven’t got anything useful out of them for well over a year.

Take a photo every day

I know this seems slightly ironic given my point above, but little projects like this are what makes the internet fun for me. As I explained in a previous post, I’m going to aim to produce a “My year in photos” collection over 2010, with a photo for every single day of the year. And for those of you that follow me on Twitter and see what I usually Twitpic – don’t worry, I’ll try to keep the pictures of my son to a minimum, I promise!

Blog smarter

As I already explained in my very first post, I do quite a bit of blogging already – not just here (if you can even call my sporadic missives ‘blogging’), but on the Tamar blog, the Econsultancy blog, Media140 and a few others. But in 2010 I’m going to try to blog more – not necessarily *more* blogging, just smarter blogging. I definitely need to keep this place a bit more lively, and I might start inviting guest bloggers on if anybody wants to contribute. With my work blogs I’m going to try to blog more about subjects people actually want to read about – not just a vanity exercise. And particularly with my work blogs, I’m only going to blog if there’s a clear benefit to doing so – not for me, obviously, but for my work.

300 entries on my map by 2011

Another of my favourite little projects at the moment is my social mash-up friend map thingy (note to self: come up with a better name for it…). I’ve had some great new entries on it lately, including some famous faces you might recognise (if you can find them!). I think the map currently has 124 photos on it – by the end of 2010 I want to get that to 300, which I think is pretty achievable. Heck, I’ve got 700 connections on Facebook, plus well over 1,000 on Twitter – 300 is a reasonable-enough chunk of that to aim for…

Somehow top 2009

Thanks to the internet, I have been lucky enough to do some very cool (and some very odd) things the past few years. As well as an appearance in The Times, a few very unflattering appearances on London Tonight, a totally libelous appearance in a book (and several subsequent mentions on the radio because of it) and meeting a few cool famous peeople, 2009 was topped off with an appearance on BBC1’s ‘Imagine‘ and a trip to Downing Street. I’m not entirely sure I *can* top those. without doing something illegal, so maybe this is a tough one – but at the very least I’d like to think I’ll get to do other interesting things in 2010…

Welcome to my brand new blog… possibly!

I’ve been mulling over the idea of having my own blog for a few years now (how indecisive am I?!) and have finally decided to dip my toe in the water and see how it feels. It’s not a decision I’m taking lightly though. Just like the issue of our over-crowded global population, I’m firmly of the opinion that there are already far too many blogs in the world (200 million plus, last time I heard!) so starting yet another is something I feel a little guilty about. To take the analogy further, there are also also a lot of unloved blogs out there in the world – perhaps I should have considered adopting an unwanted one first? Does it even work like that?!

Either way, I thought I’d at the very least give personal blogging a go – I promise I’ll stop it and delete it if nobody is reading it, how about that? I say “personal blogging” because I’m actually a regular blogger as it is anyway. I blog on our work blog at Tamar, plus I occassionally guest-blog on sites like Media140 and Econsultancy. I also run several different web projects too (details of which I’m sure I’ll share if I keep this going!) and have a very busy job and family life, so this isn’t something I’m going to be able to devote a shed-load of time to. But I promise that I’ll try to only post stuff that other people might find interesting.

One of the reasons I finally took the plunge today was a realisation that, despite blogging in a number of different places, I don’t actually have anywhere (bar Twitter) where I can give my opinion on things non-work related. For instance, I recently had a crappy experience with the LastMinute.com customer “support” team, but short of tweeting about it there was nowhere I could vent. Just the other day on Twitter I asked Google’s Spaminator Matt Cutts how best to deal with an issue I’ve had with a Google Store order (see left). His response reaffirmed the issue that not having my own blog means I have nowhere to air issues like that – so I thought that the simplest way to deal with that was to start one!

But before taking the final step and installing Wordpress as I have (and messing around with my first slew of plugins), I jotted down a few of the pro’s and con’s to me doing this, which was what eventually persuaded me. Here’s what I came up with – let me know if I missed any!

• To Blog – As I outlined above, I don’t have anywhere to post non-work related stuff, rants, vents, funnies or just random stuff.
• Not to Blog – Does anyone actually want to read that though?! Probably not for the majority, but the ability to have somewhere to rant about companies and have them actually have a chance of seeing it and taking notice is quite appealing.
• To Blog – I’ve got a reasonably-okay following on Twitter, so surely I can get a few people to read this, with the right incentives?
• Not to Blog – Let’s face it, most of them at Br!tney spam-bots anyway – can spam-bots even read?!
• To Blog – Back when I first started out with websites, I used the site henweb.co.uk as my “hub” – a good place to link to all the different stuff I was doing. I’ve not had that for a long time, and if nothing else it’ll make sure I don’t forget stuff I’m doing, which is something that happens far too often! :D
• Not to Blog – There are already 200 million blogs. Do I really need to make that 200,000,001? Have I even got time to update it or enough crap to say?
• To Blog – OF COURSE I HAVE! Anyone who knows me will attest that I’ve *always* got crap to say…! :D
• Not to Blog – Is blogging just an exercise in online vanity?
• To Blog – A few people have told me I’m an alright wordsmith in the past – including a few writers that I respect a lot. Even if nobody reads this, practise is always good isn’t it?

I’m sure there are other reasons that I’ve missed – why not let me know via the comments? If I’m being honest, I suspect my pro/con exercise was actually doing more to convince me than I’d hoped it would, but I think I’ve decided that I’m going to give this a go…

Henry

P.S. People are always telling me that I don’t do endings very well, so you might want to bear that in mind if you’re going to subscribe…!