Guy Stephens

I met up with Joshua March earlier today of Conversocial, who are doing some excellent things in the social media customer service space at the moment. Conversocial’s platform sets out to ‘manage customer service at scale in Facebook and Twitter’. They have identified a niche and are building up a solid and robust proposition. Meeting with Joshua today reminded me that I’ve not blogged for a few weeks, and that I had a number of half-written posts which I needed to finish. So keeping with the Facebook theme…

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Over the last eight to twelve months or so the use of Facebook as a customer service platform has gained increasing popularity amongst organisations willing to expand their social customer care repertoire beyond Twitter.

There is no doubt that Facebook is becoming more and more embedded into the social landscape that many of...

In 1999, the Cluetrain Manifesto was written by Rick Levine, Doc Searls, Christopher Locke and David Wienberger. The authors put forward the idea of the ‘global conversation’: 

“A powerful global conversation has begun. Through the Internet, people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed. As a direct result, markets are getting smarter – and getting smarter faster than most companies.”

In 2007, Wikinomics was written by Dan Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams. The authors write about the idea of the ‘shared canvas’:

“The new Web is…a shared canvas where every splash of paint contributed by one user provides a richer tapestry for the next user to modify or build on. Whether people are creating, sharing, or socializing, the new Web is principally about...

I was fixing my dishwasher this morning. Well, looking at it intently with the vain hope of fixing it at the back of my mind, and knowing that fixing it was highly unlikely at the front of my mind.

I Googled what I was looking for. (Do we ‘search the internet’ any more?). Found various forums with the same questions I was asking, and a variety of answers that spanned the whole gamut from simple and unhelpful through to too complicated and undecipherable. Finally I resorted to trying to find the manual that came with the dishwasher.

In the manual I found a section called ‘Fault finding’ and there was a section with the problem I was having, but none of the answers helped. So I am stuck with a...

I’ve come across a few apps recently which allow people to report a whole variety of issues from potholes in the road, graffiti, problems with street lighting, fallen branches, abandoned vehicles and more. You can also follow the progress of the issue you reported. I think the fact that local councils are using social media to reach out to people in this way is fantastic.

The thought I am left with, however, is: why use an app in the first place? Why not simply provide a #hashtag for a person to use? I understand that from a council’s perspective providing an app ensures that the report will get to the right place so it can be dealt with. But from my perspective, unless I have a huge sense of civic responsibility, I’m not sure if I would download an app that I might use on the odd occasion to report a pothole or an abandoned vehicle. However, I know, if I simply had to add a #hashtag to a Tweet I would be far more likely to report problems I happened to come across.

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