My Leaving Party/Tweetup in London

I’ve lived the last 5 years of my life as an Evangelist using social media extensively and making some new friends along the way, so I think it’s only appropriate that I have my party to mark the fact that I’m leaving Microsoft, using the same mechanisms to connect.  So after almost 8 years at Microsoft, gaining some wonderful friends and some amazing memories, my last day at Microsoft will be September 1st 2009.

 I’m having my leaving party in London on Thursday 3rd September, so that the far flung amongst you can arrive by train. I’d like you to join me for a leaving drink or two before I depart off into my future life – more of that soon…

The venue is the Slug and Lettuce, 5 Chicheley Street, SE1 7PJ, London which is close to Waterloo station http://www.london-se1.co.uk/restaurants/info/102/the-slug-and-lettuce.

I’ll be there from 6pm It would be great to see you there and say goodbye… or come over and say hello face to face if we’ve only every connected through Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook or my blog.  Hey – is this classed as a Tweetup as I syndicate my blog thorough to Twitter??

Hope to see you on  Thursday 3^rd September  -  I hope to see you there

Twitter – and good customer service

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I’m really impressed with the way that companies use Twitter to connect – really connect with their customers.  Andrew told me about his own personal experience of excellent and speedy service through Twitter.

Andrew has a really slow broadband connection – as i do – we both get about 1/2 mb each.  so VOIP calls can sometimes be a bit torturous with the latency.  I feel like speaking simplex sometimes “Roger”, “Over” “Over and Out”, its sometimes so bad.  Well Andrew complained about the speed of his broadband service

 

then look how long it took BT to respond to him…

then after a few tweets on Friday morning from BT and a visit on Tuesday evening, Andrew tweeted…

and BT responded…  

BT even came down a few days later to check the connections in the road.  Again, excellent response to their customers. 

Companies could certainly learn from this type of positive customer service and response using Twitter.  this is an amazing example of just how Twitter can be put to good use to change perception and improve satisfaction of a service, product or company.

Companies have a lot to learn here, but well done BT for being so responsive and getting great customer satisfaction from just one Tweet. nice one…

Technorati Tags: Twitter,customer service

The Power of social Networking

I’ve always believed that traditional forms of marketing is starting its decline and the way we reach others has significantly changed.  This concept thudded home to me last Thursday when I posted about being made redundant.  Now the dust has settled I thought I’d share the timeline with you.

I use Live Writer to post to both blogs (this one and my old TechNet blog).  I’d hit “Publish”, switched blogs on Live Writer and was modifying the post to publish here when the timeline started.  I use a Live writer add in to post to Twitter each time I post a blog entry, and Twitter automatically feeds my Facebook status updates.  Well at Thursday 7th May 2009 @ 4.57pm (lets call this “P”) everything started…

P: Posted to my TechNet blog

P+3 minutes: Text from Mark, our MVP who runs the Active Directory User group “just seen your Tweet” what’s happening?

P+6: Called Mark to tell him that I’d be on “garden leave” from August 10th, so I was starting to look for a new job.

P+7: Call from Zack Whittaker ZDNet asking me essentially the same thing and telling me that he had Mary Jo Foley on IM asking him what the heck was going on in the UK – and to send her best wishes

P+8: Facebook status updates start to arrive

 

P+11: email from Mary Jo Foley proving yet again just how up to date she is with news at Microsoft

P+13 email from a colleague over in Redmond recommending me for a role in Corp

Yes, this is the person I spoke to you about before – Eileen is the Robert Scoble of Europe. You can see her blogs.technet.com statistics month after month outshining many Microsoft bloggers.

On another front, if we lose Eileen we will be losing the woman who pulled together the Women in Tech movement with Cisco and Google overseas. She has spoken all around the world (I think the New Zealand Tech Ed clip is up somewhere) about women in tech and made people think well of Microsoft.

I hope at least the two of you can chat by phone – if we lose Eileen to a competitor it will be a blow.

P+15 – Finally manage to press “Publish” to my WordPress blog

P+17 Public Tweets start to arrive. James has written a nifty Powershell script to pull all of this data from Twitter and place it into Excel (Read from the bottom up and notice that there’s an hours difference here…

P+18 First email from Hannah, a colleague on the Strategic Women’s panel over at the BCS who noticed the edits I made to my WordPress blog

P+19 First DM (Private Tweet) arrives on Twitter

P+20 first Facebook direct email message

I was still trying to respond to all of the Facebook, Twitter, emails and phone calls 4 hours later!  And now,  a week later, I’m still getting mails, tweets and Facebook Status updates.  My stats on both blogs have jumped quite a bit over the last 7 days, my Twitter followers have increased by more than 10%, I’ve had several requests to send my CV off to people, and one offer so far to consider going freelance.  Lots of options to consider.

But the power of Social media continues to amaze me – and here’s the proof of its value…if you wish to communicate your message effectively…