UPDATE 18:56 June 14th – I have removed the screen capture from Prestige Gamerz website on request by their administrator.  I have, of course, kept screen captures of source entries for all quoted text and PGz entries.

For those that follow me on Twitter I hereby formally apologise for bombarding your stream with assorted #mkop-twitclan messages all last week.  But I have a story to tell which hopefully may cut me some slack.

It’s June 4th and I received heads up that Microsoft was running a competition via their MyKindofPhone website that held a lot of promise.  Basically they were offering up a prize that any gamer would love;

If you can build the biggest and best gamer clan on Twitter, you and 15 friends could win a big screen gaming experience in London. You’ll get a private cinema with games consoles and the game of your choice ready to play, food, drinks, and we’ll screen one of the best gamer films of all time.

Essentially the competition was to utilise the power of word of mouth marketing by having the entrants get their contacts to tell other people about what Microsoft were doing.  Simple and potentially cost effective marketing.

For those that haven’t previously noticed I’ve been playing Xbox 360 games with a bunch of fellow Twitterers .    Founded earlier in the year by Kip Hakes partly as we had things in common workwise, partly because it gave us a great way to augment our 140 character existence with real voices and build up a set of more meaningful friendships.   For those who were around you may remember us as  #TwitMW2Frenzy,  but honestly that’s just too long for a hashtag.  Nowadays we are to be found under #twitclan or on Xbox Live as [twit].

I dutifully entered the #TwitClan, knocked out a couple of  starter tweets and sat back.

And that was my mistake.  I presumed that with 6 other people also helping and over 800 people following me that the re-tweets would flow and it would be job done.  Not so. At all.

Sure we took an early lead but then another clan entered the race, one with purpose.  The PGz clan were coming directly from a gaming website.  I have no idea how many members they have but it became apparent a couple of days before the competition closed on Friday 11th that it was more than our lowly 6 or 7 as they had come from nowhere to steal the lead.  Fair play to them, they posted calls to arms on their forums and their members responded.

PGz has just entered a competition where 15 of us could win the chance to spend the day gaming in our own private cinema on the big screen!

Prize – If you can build the biggest and best gamer clan on Twitter, you and 15 friends could win a big screen gaming experience in London. You’ll get a private cinema with games consoles and the game of your choice ready to play, food, drinks, and we’ll screen one of the best gamer films of all time.

All we have to do is Tweet the following on Twitter -

#mkop-PGz FTW! PGz demand to win the gaming experience of a lifetime! http://bit.ly/playcomp

Just copy and paste it and Tweet it!

If we win and I believe we have a very good chance, then the lucky 15 PGz members who wish to go will have their names drawn out of a hat in a ‘live’ draw by our very own Axikal!

@gosu71 (http://prestigegamerz.com/forum.html?func=view&catid=1&id=92817)

Unfortunately in the process of jumping ahead a few of their number had talked about “spamming the hell out of this” and also offered up competition prizes of their own in return for help winning which were both at best unsportsmanlike but bordered on breaking the competition rules.   We had a wee moan amongst ourselves but decided to get serious about the whole thing.

In a very brief discussion it was clear that we actually had easy access to a very substantial user base by way of one of our member’s own website.  David Carrington is the owner and developer behind Dabr, a very popular web-based Twitter client used by tens of thousands of people from their mobile phones around the world.

David being a very sensible kind of chap made a call to stick a message on the Dabr website asking for help from his users.  More importantly he showed immense commonsense by;

• doing it in such a way as to only display the message in off-peak times so as not to bombard Twitter with thousands of promotional messages (which may have broken the ToS for Twitter and thus the rules of teh competition),
• making the link ONLY repopulate a re-tweet dialog so that users were fully aware and in control – no auto-bots or privacy issues here thanks, and
• having the whole thing stop asking prior to the competition end so that the overspill was better contained.

All in all a very shrewd set of measures to ensure not only the integrity of Dabr but also so as not to overstep the mark when it came to the rules of the competition.  I will stick my own hand up here to claim ownership of getting both David and another #twitclan member, Matt Jones, to take a number of screenshots of webpage’s and source code at this point knowing full well such a move was going to get us noticed.

Within hours of going live it was pretty obvious that it was likely to be a winning move as the sheer volume of support re-tweets was incredible.  Sure there was the occasional duplicate but when they were coming through on the last night at a couple a minute the number of unique messages was also bound to be high.

We rocketed from 71 odd tweets on the Thursday lunchtime to hundreds by the following morning.  This of course resulted in an outpouring of general name calling from our only real competitor at the time (#PGz).  I don’t think I’ve ever been called out for cheating so many times in my life.  Their annoyance was understandable, they were set for a fail.

The thing is/was that our call for help via Dabr was actually little more than #PGz’s intial call on their own forums, it was just that we chose a site with a bigger audience.  Given the intention of the competition was to drive attention to Microsoft and that it clearly wanted to see as much chatter on Twitter as possible accusations of cheating as only tweets from Clan members should be counted clearly didn’t hold water  (of course there is also the argument that why on Earth would anyone from a small Clan enter if only member tweets would be counted – it would be fait accompli for any large group).

At 12pm on Friday 11th June Dabr breathed it’s last cry for help and we sat back (again), only this time having monitored the opposition and feeling more than a little confident.

The competition closed at 2pm and for over two and a half hours everyone waited for the count.  #TwitClan polled 746 unique user re-tweets (from 71 the day before) based on over 1,400 total in our support.  We were declared the winners.

I won’t cover all the subsequent silliness from various people, it doesn’t help.  The rules were really simple, we stuck to them, pulled some very basic marketing and won through.

What we would have / could have done differently:

1) David is the first to admit he didn’t pay much attention to the close date for a few days, otherwise he’d have set Dabr running from day 1 resulting in an overwhelming win from the outset.  This might have meant a little less name calling.

2) We could have leveraged a number of other well visited sites and Twitter clients, a few Facebook pages – you know all that good social media stuff.  Given more time to prepare I’m confident we could have knocked out well in excess of 10k unique’s over the competition week.

3) Not even tried to communicate with the opposition.  In hindsight all our efforts to placate their concerns did little more than fuel their suspicions.  Hence this post and it’s setting out of our tactics.

Next Time: The Fun Begins

Came across the usual “click the box if you want to receive…” signup on OnlyMarketingJobs.com today, except on second reading (you also second read these things right?) the confusion was apparent.

You’re opting IN for more junk by NOT ticking just to be clear.

Okay I promise to try to keep this short(ish) but felt it only fair to actually post a note to say that a resolution has been reached over my protracted escaping from the clutches of the black-hole of customer service that is the mobile network 3.

Quick back-story for those not wanting to read the 2 part monster posts (here & here); I had cancelled, tried to leave, was prevented from doing so and then charged for the privilege of remaining an unwilling Customer.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – I am a very lucky person.  Lucky in that I have the great privilege of having met and maintained contact with plenty of really cool (and useful) people in the mobile industry.

I made a phone call to a senior 3 PR manager (who was on holiday), recounted the story and by the opening of play the following day the mythical 3 Executive Office was calling me to discuss.

Long story, cut short they were very apologetic, ensured the correct cancellations and credits were applied and sent me on my merry way.  Job done.

So to that lovely 3 pr manager, thank you.

To the delightful chap from 3 Executive, I thank you also.

To the senior 3 director who rang me afterwards to discuss the sneaky, underhand and downright dirty tactics of the UK’s mobile industry as a whole over the number portability – a huge thanks.

As a note: the limp and ineffective Ofcom are releasing their draft paper on number fast-portability in August, which will make for interesting reading.

A week or so ago I mentioned that I was entering the wonderful world of Customer Services this time with Halfords – the UK’s largest bike retailer (they are also pretty well known for tools and motoring accessories).

Simply I had bought a pair of bikes from Halfords, and over the course of a single week had revisited the store twice to rectify simple faults and mechanical failings.  Things that really shouldn’t but inevitably do happen with machinery.  Topping this of was a battle over in-store pricing which had meant I had lost out to the tune of 10% of the purchase price.

Well, despite taking nearly two weeks to respond (rather than the promised 5 days) Halfords CS cam back a couple of days ago.  Not only offering up a decent chunk of store vouchers for my inconvenience but also a straight refund on said 10%.

A great result and one I am really happy with.

Whilst I am honestly trying to avoid my CS rants it must be said they seem to be working for me right now and I can only advise everyone else; if you have an issue ask for help, and if that doesn’t work complain because maybe, just maybe UK companies are beginning to realise that they need to start trying to play nicely in this most modern if cash strapped of ages.

Yesterday I mentioned that my purchasing efforts with TescoDigital over the last few days have been anything but satisfactory.  I gave them the whole day to continue corresponding (which up until my last email at 11am they had been very quick to respond) but nothing so to the world I lay bare the story to do with what you will…

Tue 10th

Email marketing about the new Lily Allen album being available for only £3.97 to download.  Perfect especially in light of i) my already having waited for just this release (don’t judge me) and ii) my new found love of buying music digitally.

09:48 Wed 11th

Followed link in email and signed up for yet another store account (can you believe TescoDigital requires a separate account to Tesco.com?), dutifully downloaded their own branded music download manager (same as Amazons methinks) and handed over the credit card details.

Download manager sparked to life and promptly complained that the download server couldn’t be found.

The infrastructure engineer in me did the usual checks; cables, firewalls; conflicting software, DNS resolution, port sniffing.  Nothing the server was nowhere to be found so a quick email to customer services was in order.

c10:20 Wed 11th

Had a quick snigger at the default subject titles thinking this the most apt and filled out a form just letting them know the error message and asked for a response.

10:47 Wed 11th

A wonderful stock response was forthcoming.  Basically it was the usual “here’s what we say you need, we won’t actually read what you have already written about the problem but could you please tell us everything about your system and restate the problem?”

Having worked with helpdesks in the past I can well understand this approach – it can weed out the silly and repetitive nonsense which takes up so much time.  BUT maybe just maybe on that original contact form if they’d asked for say i) a level of expertise and ii) confirmation that I’d already tried everything they were about to suggest the user experience might have been a little better, the process a little smoother.

Anyway, a quick response just answering those questions as required and…

13:45 Wed 11th

I’m very sorry that you weren’t able to connect to the Tesco Digital website. It is temporarily unavailable as we were doing some essential maintenance and upgrade work on the servers/Tesco Download Manager. This has taken a little longer than we had originally planned. I would advise you to try again later on this evening, please try to redownload from your order history.

Okay so they were having problems.  So why not fess up at the outset and save me some effort!

08:48 Thur 12th

So I waited until the this morning to give them plenty of time to solve their server issues. But, now the TescoDigital don’t seem to know who I am.  What I found strange was that I had actually re-downloaded the stub from their website in my order history.

Needless to say another email to Wayne Hansen (TescoDigital Customer Service Manager) pointing out that something was still broken.

09:47 Thur 12th

Again, I’m sorry to advise this error message was due to the system problems we had on our Tesco.com website yesterday.
I’ve updated your Tesco Digital account to delete this error message, please try to redownload your music tracks from your order history and this should resolve your issue.

So again I try and now the error heads into DRM territory.  Oh deary me.  Now I only chose to use TescoDigital because it quite clearly says it doesn’t apply DRM to it’s MP3 downloads.  Further whilst it does say that you can only download the files so many times and that remaining attempt are indicated on the order page I could find no indication of that usage count. More to the point I have only been downloading the stubs when and as directed by TescoDigital.

Needless to say another email requesting that Wayne actually confirms the problem is resolved before telling me to try again.

10:45 Thurs 13th

And then it happened.  TescoDigital actually failed.  Why do I  think the fail is now and not when the process broke down earlier?  Easy – technical faults happen, it’s a fact of life and I accept that, especially when the provider can be seen to be responsive and attempting to solve the issue.  The fail here was in Wayne’s response;

After 11 emails TescoDigital decide to ditch the purchase rather than fix the problem – despite it being of their own making.  I did respond to Wayne suggesting that as I actually still wanted the album perhaps TescoDigital should just get on with it, but 24  hours later no response so…

13:28 Friday 13th

I’ve just bought the same album from AmazonUK for 97 pence less thanks Tesco with no hassles at all.  Your loss.

The real task for today was firstly to talk to lots of interesting and useful people at Tuttle, as indeed I did. Secondly to spend as much time defining where the value in getting a Barney onboard as a consultant strategist lies. As ever @TonyHall provided a muse. Probing, intrusive and inciteful questioning has me thinking that;

1. I don’t write enough stuff down (@robertobrien – yes I know you have long held that belief),
2. Some of what I talk about needs to be talked about,
3. A lot of what I think needs questioning, not least because I need the challenge to firm up thinking,
4. That I must must must stop worrying about the inconsequential side of aesthetics and get on with the job in hand.

So my mission – along with exploring notions of trust, graphs, semantics and a pile of other stuff – is to write some kind of demonstrable, measurable, quantifiable and costable reason for being. Eek.

One of my most insurmountable challenges these days is in deciding what is and isn’t important on a daily basis. The volume of stuff is so great that prioritisation, and more importantly filtering are starting to come into play.

As an example today I must have had over 30 emails from websites from which I have bought something, commented upon or in some way been foolish enough to have left my contact details with. Now 30 might not sound like a huge number but in my already attention stretched world of social networks and real life conversations, having to wade through those 30 to find the 3 or 4 genuinely interesting emails was a pain.

Now that’s not to say they were spam – Google Mail generally takes care of the 300+ a day obvious spam, indeed at the right time, in the right place the majority of those 30 would have contained something of interest, right down to the third Amazon email this week promoting a product I have just bought from Amazon right back at me!

So what is the answer?

I honestly don’t know. I could grab ANOTHER email address for even more personal emails (got several already) or….. oh sod it. In the time it’s taken me to whine and complain about my lack of time I could easily have browsed those 30 emails. Duh.