Fatherhood² | Henry's Blog

Posts Tagged ‘twitter’

I was recently asked to contribute to an eBook being produced in Australia for would-be Mummy Bloggers. As well as being very flattered (and just as keen), I thought it would be a good opportunity to pass on some of the tips and tricks I’ve learnt whilst blogging over the past few years – as well as some of the advice I give our clients.

As well as pimping my own chapter (“How to get traffic and measure it”), which I hope proves useful to first-time bloggers, some of the other contributors are WAY better than me, so it’s worth a read whatever level of blogger you consider yourself to be. I particularly like the “Ten Easy Blog Post Ideas” list on page 20, most of which I quite regularly use myself!
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As somebody who works in online marketing, I spend most of my day connected to the many different social media sites that I work with in one way or another. But I don’t just use them during the working day, so I like to make sure – for instance – my Twitter feed is as varied as my tastes are. I follow industry folk, a smattering of celebrities, friends and family, but I also follow some slightly more random accounts.

Some of my favourite people to follow are those representing the kids TV shows which we enjoy watching with Robert. I’m not entirely sure why to be honest – it’s not like Robert is going to understand if I say to him “Hey, you’ll never guess what Driver Dan just tweeted!”. But it makes me happy, and I suspect other parent’s feel the same. So, for other tweeting parents, I thought I’d highlight some of my favourites…
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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

Following my earlier, gush-tastic post on my evening at Downing Street, I’m collating the other coverage the event got – partially for my own purposes, but also for anyone else who was there and wants to connect to other bloggers / posters from the night. Plus, I’m going to add in some good TwitPics of the event that I’ve found…

• Sarah Milne has posted Part 1 (of 2) of her summation of the event, on her blog “My Journey with William“. Reading Sarah’s story makes me feel guilty for having had such a relatively stress-free life thus far, and I’m proud to say I’ve met her now. Update: Part 2 is now also up.
• Mrs Brown herself posted an excellent story on the Huffington Post – plus, as you’d expect, she’s been tweeting follow-ups all day long.
• Tom Scholes-Fogg of Young Labour has posted a short summary of the event on his blog.
• Sue Atkins of Positive Parents has a very nice blog about the event; Another great tweeter who I met for the first time last night.
• Mr Richard Bacon apparently talked about his time at the event on his brand-new 6Music show today. I wasn’t able to listen as we were out, but I’m going to catch-up with it on the iPlayer tomorrow – so should you!
• Sarah Brown has set up a new Flickr account, where she has posted a number of great shots from the event.
• Musician Kevin Hewick has written a mammoth blog about the evening, though I resent his use of the term “Hooray Henrys” obviously! :D
• The lovely Holly Shaw has a very nice write up of the evening on her blog “Transplants, Tantrums and Tiaras”.
• Sandy Calico has a great run-down of the evening, with some nice photos and some funny stories.
• Hamish Thompson has a good account of the evening, with a very good explanation of the Million Mums cause too.
• Ben Matthews is one of the founders of Twestival, and you can read his blog here.
• The team at MumsRock have a nice round-up of the evening, including a very funny story about label supporters…
• The brilliantly-titled “Notes to self plus two (and the need for red shoes)” has a good post about the party.
• The Confident Ladies have a nice blog covering their day at Downing Street too.
• The lovely @tinypoppet has a great coup with her coverage – she’s actually been to Downing Street twice…
• Grace Fletcher-Hackwood has covered the even on her GAFH blog.
• Last but definitely not least, you can read the official coverage of the party from Downing Street themselves at Number10.gov.uk

Pictures from the event, almost all of which were posted by Sarah Brown herself:

Please do let me know (in the comments) of other pictures/blogs I’ve missed, and I’ll add them in!

On Friday the 4th of December, 2009, I was lucky enough to be invited to attend a party hosted by the Prime Minister’s wife, Sarah Brown. Brown is a big Twitter advocate, with almost 1 million followers, and she apparently decided to hold a party for a selection of the people she interacts with on Twitter. Which is pretty cool!

The party was entitled the “Downing Tweet Christmas Party” and was held to celebrate / publicise the Million Mums campaign, a campaign by the White Ribbon Alliance, that Mrs Brown is the chairman of. Among the attendees were patrons of various other charities, campaigners, political bloggers, people connected with Million Mums and a smattering of celebrities.

Having been pretty gob-smacked to have been invited in the first place (I assumed the address-request sent by Brown on Twitter was simply going to result in a Christmas card!), I was pretty damn nervous to be heading to Downing Street. A few searches on Twitter originally reassured me that the sort of people going were just others like me – Twitter regulars and all-round normal people. Then, on the morning of the party, I started to notice a few famous people tweeting about it, including Richard Bacon and Channel 4′s Krishnan Guru Murthy. Cue a total brown-trousers moment from me, suddenly glad that I decided to take a tie after all.

10 Downing Street is a pretty spectacular building, and I was amazed at how much of it we were allowed to wander freely around – I stood staring at a painting of Maggie Thatcher for a good few minutes, wondering why she looked so uptight, ha ha! The party took place on the first floor, with the several-hundred attendees allowed to look around and peer through doors and windows quite freely.

Highlights of the evening for me included:

• Singer Beverley Knight doing a live performance of her songs “Shoulda Woulda Coulda” and Gold, standing in front of the drawing room (?) Christmas Tree. She was lovely too, and I even got to chat to her for a bit.
• Introducing myself to Richard Bacon, who I had a nice chat with. He’s certainly a snappy dresser too!
• Wandering up and down the famous stair-case, looking at all the past Prime Minister pictures
• Shaking Gordon Brown’s hand – though I didn’t actually get to say anything to him, as he was being “networked” by a number of good networkers
• Other famous people that were there but I didn’t get to speak much to included Kirstie Allsopp, Peter Serafinowicz, Caitlin Moran, Emma Freud, Rebecca Front and that guy from the X-Factor who spends too much time shaping his beard… I’m thinking Brian? :D

I also had a chat to a few random MPs who I’m ashamed to say I didn’t really recognise – though Alastair Darling’s wife introduced herself to me, and we had a bit of a joke about how annoying it is when the neighbours hold a party!

I didn’t get to take many photos, since cameras and phones are taken off you at the entrance (though very politely!) but there are a few included with this post, and I’m sure there will be some more when the official photographer pictures get posted online.

I’ll shut up about this now, since I know a few people on Twitter are already getting annoyed by my babble. But I should urge you before I sign off to go over to the Million Mums website and register yourself – it only takes 10 seconds, and since we’ve all got mothers of our own I think it’s pretty relevant to everybody!

Oh, one last thing… yes, it was JUST like in Love Actually! :D

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…!