Should You Validate Your Twitter Following?

I followed someone today on Twitter, a real person in fact I had just had a coffee and a long chat with them.  Nothing new there I agree but within seconds of committing the follow I received a Direct Message from a service called TrueTwit asking me to validate my profile.

The premise of the service is that by asking all new followers to jump through a few basic hoops (captcha’s and such) TrueTwit can validate that the profile belongs to a proper person rather than a spambot.  Seems a smart enough idea providing some provenance but it got me thinking…

1. Do I really care if accounts following me are real people or bots enough to ask new followers to place a barrier to them following me?
2. By not validating oneself as a person how does TrueTwit preclude that account from following other than by simply applying a “block”?
3. Even blocking a profile does not prevent an account on Twitter from @ replying anyway as it is not follow/following dependant.
4. What about those bots I actually want to follow me, those which I use for automated functions?

What would be more useful to me would be the ability to validate those that I wish to follow, or at least selectively.  Of course the problem there would be akin to the first point above, “do I care if you follow me enough to validate myself to you?”

Any thoughts on Twitter or any other SocNet validation usefulness?

ReThinking Privacy and Trust (Futures-Diagnosis)

It’s rare that I directly quote/plug another blog post just for the sake of just that, but Norman Lewis has a take on privacy so close to my own and is just that much more eloquent that if you are at all interested in this field it’s worth 5 minutes of your attention.

So go have a read over at Norman’s blog Futures-Diagnosis.

In Marketing Privacy Legal Compliance is Never Enough

News hit the feeds today that, rather unsuprisingly, BT has dropped plans to run with the behavioural tracking company Phorm.   If any (marketing) company ever wanted proof positive where privacy is concerned that the will of the masses has greater authority than merely being legally compliant – this is it.

BT helped to develop Phorm and the system adheres to the UK DPA (if not the EU), consulted with the Home Office to ensure their position but screwed up by breaking the social norms in place by the community at large.

But BT did what any commercial entity would have done and ditched the system (irrespective of it’s worth or value) when it was apparent that their ability to retain Customers was severely hampered as trust had broken down.

In a world so acutely (albeit not always accurately) sensitised to security and privacy issues it never ceases to amaze me that companies believe that just because legally they can do something means they should.

TescoDigital – Update on Rebuilding Trust

Last week was all about TescoDigital’s inability to deliver, inability to resolve and inability to retain.  The full story is over here.

But as an update on Sunday 15th I received an email from Malcolm Gwynne, another “Customer Service Manager” (just how many do they have) over at TescoDigital apologising for the problems and  offering up £3.97 in eWallet credit – kinda like prepay for digital music on TescoDigital’s site.

I am sorry for the delay in getting back to you and that there was a fault with the Lily Allen album.

This has now been fixed and I do apologise for any inconvenience this may have caused.

I have now added £3.97 to your eWallet so that you can try again.

Please go back to TescoDigital and follow the instruction on how to use the eWallet.

Grateful as I am for the credit has this helped TescoDigital rebuild my trust in them; not one iota I’m afraid.  The reason is two fold;

Firstly, the very attraction of online digital music transactions is the immediacy of them, I see something, I click buy and a couple of minutes later I’m listening to to those newly paid for tracks on my computer.

Malcolm’s response took over 72 hours from my last email – that’s too long, especially when until that point the emails had flowed freely almost conversationally.

And I guess there in lies a problem with digital communication for customer service.  The expectation of timeliness inherent with the medium.

If I post a letter to someone a week for a response doesn’t seem unreasonable, an email say 24 hours, an instant message – well instantly of course.

So for a purchase to take 4 to 5 days is just not a viable model for me.

Secondly, and I’ve touched on this already.  If you’re going to tell the customer it’s fixed then make sure the bloody thing is fixed.  £3.97 added to my eWallet – I think not!

TescoDigital – Destroying Brand Trust 101

So after my rant about the silly episode in trying to purchase a digital copy of Lily Allen’s new album, and with all that off my chest maybe I should highlight a couple of bits that really irked me.

Listen and React Appropriately

As mentioned I can accept technical failings when attempts are made to correct them.  But sloppy or incomplete answers, not actually reading the information given and acting upon it are straight from the “Helpdesks for Dummies” manual.

If someone gives you the error message, and a very specific one at that, come clean about the fault and any resolutions.  Don’t hide behind 1001 questions that aren’t related.

Even more importantly if you think you’ve solved  the problem at your end, for goodness sake check it works before letting the customer know.

Terms and Conditions

In the course of investigating the in’s and out’s of this little episode I chanced to actually read through TescoDigital’s terms & conditions.  Now like most corporate entities they are long, onerous and not really designed to be read by humans – after all why would a normal consumer want/need to read them, Tesco is a trusted brand.

Well they are shite quite honestly.

Phrases like;

The Tesco Digital Site is provided by Tesco without any warranties or guarantees.

and,

To the full extent allowed by applicable law, you agree that we will not be liable to you and/or any third party for any consequential or incidental damages (including but not limited to loss of revenue, loss of profits, loss of anticipated savings, wasted expenditure, loss of privacy and loss of data) or any other indirect, special or punitive damages whatsoever that arise out of or are related to the Tesco Digital Site.

have NO place in T&C’s of reputable, reliable and trustworthy businesses in my opinion.  If you building a brand which you want people to trust stand behind it, offer up warranties and guarantees, even better just be known for putting things right.

Deliver, Don’t Ditch

Wayne’s final solution was to unilaterally cancel the sale (albeit with a refund) and bale. In effect Wayne’s actions could be perceived by me (the customer) as,

“Tesco has done it’s bit, we can’t be bothered trying to solve OUR problems anymore and for three quid why would we so here’s your money back, be  on your way.”

Yes I refer to Tesco not TescoDigital because as a customer I’m seeing the brand not the outlet and let me tell you the image of that brand isn’t looking so great from my end right now.

They broke the contract = bad.

They destroyed the brand trust = disastrous.

An Unspoken Code of Trust Amongst Mobile Workers

Who says there is no goodwill, no decent human beings in the world, that trust is dead?

As I sit here in the ICA Bar I could have highlighted a good dozen or so occasions today where people have demonstrated plenty of decency towards others.

Right now I am sat at the table next to – well who knows.  I don’t.  He’s just a guy sat down sharing a power socket getting on with work/play again who knows, who cares.

The point is he just got up and went outside to receive a phone call leaving his laptop unattended and unlocked.

Earlier on I left mine sitting on the table at #tuttle with little regard for it’s safety (mind you the disk is double encrypted so good luck to would be thieves).

There seems to be an unspoken code of “we’re sharing a space, we’re doing similar activities so look out for me and I’ll look out for you” going on here.

Something I was quite used to in New Zealand but never really expected to find in London.

In fact thinking on it the number of times people on the train just get up to put stuff in bins or pop to the WC leaving a coat or bag in situ astounds me.

Maybe there are more decent people out there than we all give credit to.

Trusting ‘friends’ on social networks

Fresh New Take on Things?

A few weeks back I was talking to Tony Hall (Another Photograph) at the every mind-expanding Tuttle Club. An interesting chap with a background in education (tertiary if memory recalls, and sadly it does fail me as I approach the big FOUR OH) Tony and I chatted for a good hour about, well not alot and everything all at the same time.

What I took away from the conversation was just how valuable conversation can be, an idle chat which allowed Tony to probe my inner mental workings and I to exercise thoughts and feelings. A conversation recently sadly lacking from my life (and no disrespect to my super intelligent wife or parents) having recently moved back to the UK.

It reminded of Chris Locke’s essay in The Cluetrain Manifesto when he talked about his role as a PR guy for an AI company back in the early 90′s.

“I started having genuine conversations with genuinely interesting people. I’d call up… no agenda, no objective – and we’d talk.”

“These conversations weren’t work. They were interesting and engaging. They were exciting. They were fun. I couldn’t wait to get back to work…”

Locke found this approach to be far more productive generating, in his case, far more positive attention for his employer.

So back to me then – after all this is my space for socialising thoughts and as a reader you can always change the channel.

I like to think of Social Media as a shelf full of toys for facilitating conversation, I am by no means a Social Media expert but my dialogue with Tony help me revisit long since filed away thoughts on the underlying purposefulness of Social Media. More to the point; is there a singular reason behind why conversational approaches work so well?

Is is because of some deep human desire for inclusion into a thought or decision making process, or a narcissistic want to espouse one’s own knowledge (which certainly drives me for sure)? Well probably both of those and a pile of other rationale, but I suspect that underpinning the lot is trust. Or more correctly a notion of trust.

You see Trust is really just a personal perception of how much faith we place in another entity based upon a set of very personal criteria. Each of us will have very different notions of how much faith we place in certain brands, people, thoughts etc based upon things that matter to us personally.

Conversation in a professional context helps to build a relationship, one in which each party not only understands the content of the conversation but the position from which the other party comes from. Trust dictates the weight of that conversation within it’s context.

So in the case of my ramblings with Tony, he as an educationalist (well ex) was interested in the thinking behind some of my thinking on the whole social space, he was looking as the sociological side of my thought processes. For him, I suspect (read hope) his interest was piqued by some eloquent elaboration on why this is that, and that is this. From Tony’s perspective I appeared to know what I was talking about and therefore he was able to make a personal assessment of how much trust he should place in my thinking.

I on the other hand wanted, no needed, Tony’s attention and at some level validation of my thoughts. I wanted his trust. Why? Because as an ex-educationalist, as a fellow Tuttle Club attendee, as an interesting and inciteful thinking I trusted Tony’s opinion. It mattered to me as in my judgement Tony was qualified to pass judgement.

And this surely holds true for conversations in all sectors; brand to consumer (yuk word but hey), business to business, even government to electorate. I mean just look at the unprecidented use of social media by the US Democratic campaign to engender trust in the Obama/Biden ticket. Would people really have voted for Obama if they hadn’t trusted that he was the best option for the role? I certainly hope not.

So I am going to have to explore this area again, more, a lot more as to my mind everything revolves around trust.