FIR Cut - Travel and Twitter

• Cut from episode 580: Airlines and politicians make good use of Twitter during the holiday travel nightmare affecting the U.S. East Coast.

Download the file here (MP3, 4,16Mb; length 10:19), or sign up for the RSS feed to get this cut segment and all future ones automatically.

A lesson for Etsy

UPDATE: Today, January 14, Etsy has announced policy changes that were sparked by the protest outlined in the post below. These changes prohibit the offending products. The post notes that the “intense debate” online led to the review of the policies and subsequent changes.

UPDATE: CNN Headline News has covered the tale of the cards for sale on Etsy.

UPDATE: Per Jonathan Mast, Etsy continues to respond to complaints with a canned reply. There’s now a petition with nearly 15,000 signatures asking Etsy to remove the cards.

A company-wide culture that embraces the customer experience, and community managers who reflect the culture, are… Read More »

Why I live-tweet conference sessions

Several of the participants here at the Social Media Summit that Ragan Communications is presenting at SWIFT’s headquarters in Belgium have asked me why I engage in live-tweeting. It’s not that they think I shouldn’t; they’re curious about what motivates me. I get several benefits from live-tweeing events I attend:

• Imprinting important ideas—When I tweet a statistic, a fact, or an idea that I hear, it helps imprint that idea in my mind. What’s more, I can revisit my own tweets to recall what I thought was important. It’s a form of note-taking.
• Brand-building—Ragan is my primary strategic business partner. The company is trying to make… Read More »

A text question doesn’t have to lead to a text answer

While attention is fragmenting across multiple web channels and formats, there are smart ways to use different pieces of the online puzzle to create a single, unified communication effort, even for something as simple as answering a question.

As copycats began creating cringe-inducing one-offs of the Old Spice Twitter-YouTube experiment, I suggested in a post on this blog that the real lesson from the Old Spice guy responding to tweets with often-hysterical YouTube videos is that queries on Twitter need not be answered solely on Twitter. The response can link to a YouTube video if video is better suited to providing a good answer.

… Read More »

How to rock a tweetchat

Tweetchats aren’t exactly the first thing organizations employing social media think of, but it’s getting more and more common to see them used as a communications tool. I’m not talking about the weekly tweetchats organized and attended by enthusiasts. These are the one-time tweetchats hosted by organizations to address an issue or promote capabilities.

Tweetchats, in case you’re not familiar with them, are single-topic discussions conducted over Twitter with the use of a hashtag that defines the theme. Services like Twubs and Tweetchat.com make it easy to see only the tweets from the chat.

The first tweetchat I remember was… Read More »

Can you shrink your way to success without annoying your customer?

I had two interesting conversations at a family event last night in my home town in Southern California. (Truth be told, I had a lot of interesting conversations, but only two that warrant discussion here.)

First was my nephew, the oldest of my brother’s three boys. He’s going to school, doing some part-time work in the TV industry, and working more-or-less full-time for a restaurant near his home. He’s a server and formerly host at the restaurant where, he told me, the parent company has cut back on the number of servers and implemented customer charges for “extras.”

For example, he told me, a customer ordered a salad with bleu… Read More »

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