Social Productivity: Don’t Just Twitter Your Time Away


You and your business have made the commitment to the social web. You’ve created Twitter accounts, you’ve got a LinkedIn profile, you’re blogging and commenting on other relevant blogs, you’ve created a Facebook Page for your business, you're testing the geo-location waters with Foursquare and Gowalla.

Feeling overwhelmed yet? You’re not the only one. Between keeping up with social media sites and running an actual business, many people feel there just aren’t enough hours in the day. Either you never find time to get to your social media accounts (and your last Tweet was three months ago) or you get lured in and spend way too much time online (“Google drifting” from one cool site to another.)

So, how do you strike a balance, giving your online presence the time it needs and deserves, but not getting so “addicted” that it becomes more important than the work you’re using it to promote? The most important step in creating a working – and workable – plan is knowing what’s important to you and to your business. Here are some ideas to help keep you on track:

Positioning:
Know who you are, what your unique offering is, and what value you bring to the market.
Clearly defining who you are is the first step in focusing in on what social media platforms are important to you, what you should be bringing to the table when you participate, and how frequently you should be posting. If you’re positioned as a top source of breaking hedge fund trend news, for instance, you will want to be updating while the market is open and much more frequently than if you are positioned as a retirement management resource. If your business is positioned as a premier local entertainment venue, you might discover that evening is the best time for your posts to reach the audience you want to connect with.

Purpose:
Identify your goals and the strategies you’ve chosen to help you achieve them. If your goal is to connect with potential customers by providing content that positions you as a trusted resource about vineyards, you may not need to spend a lot of time participating in a Twitter thread about the New York Jets (unless, of course, you’re a Long Island vineyard, in which case you might!)

Priorities:
Know which social media platforms are the most tactically important for your business and prioritize participation. If you’ve positioned yourself as a luxury brand, niche communities and sites like A Small World, Generation Benz or ArtSlant, may be more valuable uses of your time than MySpace, for instance. If YouTube content is driving more people to your video production website than Facebook, prioritizing frequent YouTube updates is a smart move. If FourSquare isn’t adding much value to your local business (and you are consistently your own Mayor) sit geo-location out for a while and concentrate on the platforms that are creating a local community for you. You can’t be everywhere at once, so don’t waste time with platforms that aren’t working for you.

Planning
Make time in your calendar for social media updates and treat it like a meeting: arrive on time, give it your full attention, and wrap it up before it drags on too long. Creating a routine can go a long way to keeping you focused. If your business benefits from updating LinkedIn and LinkedIn groups twice a week, put it on your calendar. Combine checking in with Facebook, Twitter, and key blogs with checking your email first thing in the morning (more time for that bagel!) Once you find a schedule that works for you, stick with it. That way you are less likely to feel the pressure to check your social media accounts when you should be doing other work.

Rely on Tools:
Take some time to experiment with social media tools and find the ones that work for you. Oneforty.com, which calls itself a “social business software hub,” is a great site for discovering new tools and shortcuts.

• Create a “listening suite,” with tools like Twitter Search, Google Alerts, Social Mention, and Blogpulse, schedule a time to monitor mentions, and stick to that schedule.
• Use browser “favorites” and “bookmark” functions to create an easy-to access list of the blogs and Twitter accounts you are monitoring.
• Use a posting tool, like Tweetdeck or HootSuite, that makes it possible to update and monitor Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn from one location.
• Create a “measuring suite,” with tools like Google Analytics, Bit.ly, TweetStats, Technorati, PostRank, and Facebook Ad analytics, to let you know how you’re doing.

Once you’ve clearly defined your positioning, goals, and strategy, you can prioritize your social media tools, create a schedule, and stick to it. When you’ve clearly identified what you are trying to achieve, you can trim what’s not working and spend quality time on what’s truly important for you and your business.



This post was commissioned by British Airways. The opinions are my
own.

One Size Doesn't Fit All

You’ve seen those awkward updates on Facebook – short fragments via Tweetdeck with a string of Twitter “#hashtags.” You’ve seen them on Twitter – long ones that are cut off mid-sentence and followed by a Facebook URL. You’ve seen the off-topic tweets in your LinkedIn feed about the latest MBA trade or the latest political scandal. You’ve seen the endless and ubiquitous Foursquare check-ins to cafes and bars and conferences. And you’ve seen the tone-deaf pre-scheduled tweets about marketing that keep automatically popping up while the entire Twitter world is reacting to something timely and important, like an earthquake or an election.

While it may seem like a clever way to save time and make your content do double (and sometimes quadruple) duty, using tools that automatically cross-post the same content to different social media channels is not a smart business move.

What’s wrong with cross posting? Why not take advantage of applications like Tweetdeck that let you post from multiple accounts with a single keystroke? Why not link your Twitter account to your Facebook and LinkedIn feeds? Why not send new blog activity directly to Twitter? Or create editorial calendars and use a tool like CoTweet to schedule all your updates one to two months in advance?

Inappropriate cross posting undermines the purpose — and the value — of using social media in the first place, which is to create communities for your business and engage authentically with your customers, potential customers, colleagues, partners, and peers.

Each social media platform has its own character and its own community etiquette and protocols. Your blog is a forum where you can express what’s on your mind and what you think your community will find valuable or debatable. Facebook is a great way to engage a community that already likes and supports you and provide that community with visually rich content. LinkedIn is your “business news wire,” a great tool for letting your business networks know about your company’s — and your own — successes. And Twitter is a virtual networking party: a place to engage with new contacts as well as established ones.

When you send telegraphic tweets to Facebook, instead of taking the time to communicate directly with your Facebook community, you are saying that that community is not something you value enough to truly engage with. When you cross-post from Facebook to Twitter, you are telling the Twitter community you haven’t bothered to show up and log on. When you automatically send an endless stream of off-topic tweets to LinkedIn, you are telling important business contacts that you don’t respect their time. When you schedule updates in advance, you are missing valuable opportunities to demonstrate your business’ value in real-time and respond to real-time events. And the fact that you just became the mayor of Starbucks is – face it! – a private matter between you and your barista and not something your business network wants to see cluttering up its feeds.

When you automate and cross-post, you are demonstrating “poor citizenship” in the various social communities you’ve joined. And you are revealing to your communities that you are on automatic pilot, that you are not really there engaging with them but, instead, just flooding their inboxes with one-way communication. Treating social media like another direct mail channel is — to put it simply — a waste of each platform’s potential.

Of course there are some exceptions: content that is appropriate to post on all your social media platforms – short updates announcing a speaking engagement or a new blog post, for instance. But even if you are using a tool like Tweetdeck or CoTweet to post to multiple social media sites, taking a few minutes to customize each update – brief and punchy for Twitter, more inclusive and engaging for Facebook, “Business Casual” for LinkedIn — makes a world of difference. It tells each of those communities that you “get it,” that you understand the etiquette, that you value their eyes and their time and their feedback, that you are an active, transparent, and authentic participant.

Just like “bespoke” clothes have much more value than “off the rack” ones do, “bespoke” social media updates will create much more value for you and your community than “one size fits all” updates. If you take the extra time to put your best foot forward and use social media tools well, engaging appropriately to each platform in real time, you will earn your communities’ trust and respect and create tremendous value for your business. Make sure that each of your updates is appropriate to the platform and has value for that particular community and your community will return the favor with value for you.

This post was commissioned by British Airways. The opinions are my
own.

Groupon and Kenneth Cole: Trafficking in Human Misery

On Sunday night, the otherwise beloved social buying site, Groupon.com, caused gasps in living rooms across America -- as well as virtual gasps on computer screens across America -- with their Super Bowl ad. The ad copy proposes that, while the Tibetan people are in danger of extinction, Tibetan refugees do make excellent fish curry for Groupon customers to enjoy.

The fact that Groupon is also promoting online contributions to The Tibet Fund and promising matching donations of up to $100,000 was not mentioned in the surprisingly graceless and unfunny ad, prompting the question: were there any grownups in charge when their agency pitched the ad? (In advertising there actually are some times -- although granted not many -- when a focus group really is a good idea.)

To his credit, Groupon Founder and Chief Executive Andrew Mason wrote a blog post in which he underscores that Groupon takes social responsibility very seriously. He graciously defended their ad agency, saying it "strives to draw attention to the cultural tensions created by brands" and claimed that Groupon was making fun of itself, much the way Hulu did last year in an ad by the same agency. Mason also noted that the ads that he personally finds offensive are "the scores of Super Bowl ads that are built around the crass objectification of women," adding, in a bit of wishful thinking, "unlike those ads, no one walks away from our commercials taking the causes we highlighted less seriously."

Perhaps no one in the Groupon office will take them less seriously, but undoubtedly the very same viewers who enjoy light beer and the objectification of women will do just that, having been subtly prompted to do so by Groupon. And while the Hulu ad made fun of Hulu's service, saying that it rotted your brain, the Groupon ads aren't just making fun of Groupon's service, they are making fun of a people who are having their brains blown out by an oppressor. 

Groupon's lapse in taste was even more inexplicable coming on the heels of last week's social media gaffe by designer Kenneth Cole, who tweeted: "Millions are in uproar in #Cairo. Rumor is they heard our new spring collection is now available online at http://bit.ly/KCairo - KC." That Tweet was particularly offensive because of the use of the "#", which inserted it into the stream of political Tweets that activists and sympathizers were following (and we wonder why the world hates America!)

Cole was quick to apologize, as well, and to remove the offending Tweet, but it wasn't the first time he had appropriated death and suffering to sell blazers and hobo bags. In his "Today is Not a Dress Rehearsal," campaign, launched only five months after September 11th, 2001, he created a particularly upsetting ad featuring a sexy model stretched out on a dining room table eating strawberries in her skimpy Kenneth Cole clothes, with the tagline "On September 12th, families returned to the dining room table."

While most of Cole's provocative ads suggest positive change (if you agree with him politically, of course), his "it's all about me" appropriations of real loss and tragedy, like the Groupon ad, minimize and trivialize the very real suffering of the Egyptian and Tibetan countries, communities, and cultures.

People in Egypt and Tibet are struggling and dying for the same fundamental freedoms that allow Cole and the good folks at Groupon to make their own political and social views heard. While it is often said that all publicity is good publicity, let's hope that Kenneth Cole (the brand), Groupon, and all companies for that matter stop capitalizing on and trivializing human misery and suffering for commercial gain and to drive traffic to businesses and websites. That kind of "trafficking" and commoditization of pain, death, and passionately held political beliefs has no place in truly responsible advertising or social media outreach.

Tweeting Behind Your Back: What You Can't See Might Hurt You

Every speaker's nightmare is an audience full of hecklers who feel free to shout out comments the way sports fans shout at their TVs ("You call that a triple axel?!?") and bloodthirsty ancient Romans shouted at gladiators ("You call yourself a Thracian?!?) Unfortunately, that's exactly what's happening, all too frequently, when cutting edge conferences include a Twitter "backchannel" -- a real-time electronic screen behind the speaker that displays a rolling stream of the audience's tweeted comments.

That particular interactive feature is designed to create an impromptu online "community" around the event and to encourage conversation and interaction. But it can also backfire with results that range from mildly distracting to downright disastrous.

Even the founder of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, is not immune to being heckled via his own invention. When he shared the stage, recently, with a Jungian analyst at New York's Rubin Museum, someone mistakenly tweeted that Dorsey "will answer questions in real-time" instead of "will answer questions about Carl Jung that an analyst is tweeting in real-time." While Dorsey was having an interesting conversation about one of Jung's "mandala paintings" (which reminded him of a street grid with a public commons,) giant tweets were rolling past on the screen behind him with questions like "What do you think about the tweeter who got arrested?" and "You better do something about spam!" The real-time tweets effectively "spammed" the more interesting conversation about what real-time communication reveals about the collective unconscious.

But while that Twitterstream was off-topic and distracting -- the way a television is during dinner -- those pesky tweets were nothing compared to the damage that can be done when Twitter backchannel heckling turns personal.

That's what happened at Web 2.0 Expo, a recent three day conference in New York that brought together some of the best minds in digital media. One of the more interesting speakers, Danah Boyd, was being "tweet-slapped" so mercilessly during her talk, "Streams of Content," that the conference organizers, wisely -- and ironically - decided to pull the plug on the "stream of content" that was being projected behind her as she spoke.

Boyd is a brilliant and complex theoretician - a Microsoft researcher and a Harvard fellow for starters -- and miscalculated by trying to deliver too dense a talk in too short a time without a laptop "teleprompter." As a result, she read quickly from her stack of written notes while audience members who were "live tweeting" about her talk struggled to understand and to keep up.

The first salvo from the Twittersphere was fairly mild: a tweet that admonished her to "take a breath." But when that tweet rolled down the giant screen behind her, a portion of the audience laughed. Boyd - who couldn't see the tweet or the audience -- got rattled by the laughter and started reading even faster. Increasingly snarky tweets followed, then tweets protesting the snark, and soon the audience was paying more attention to the "tweet-off" on the screen than to the stream of Boyd's ideas.

Reflecting on that public pillorying in her own blog, Boyd wrote that, generally, if an audience "doesn't want to be challenged, they tune out or walk out. Yet, with a Twitter stream, they have a third option: they can take over." And that is exactly what some members of the audience did: criticizing her, joking about her, on the big screen behind her back while she soldiered on, unaware that she was being dissed.

While public "conversation" and the creation of online community around a presentation can add value (particularly in a less formal setting where a speaker can take questions from the stream), many people feel that projecting a Twitterstream behind a speaker is distracting and just downright rude.

To their credit, as soon as it was clear that the tone had deteriorated, the Web 2.0 Expo organizers came to Ms. Boyd's defense and turned off the stream (and were heckled, both verbally and via Twitter, for having done so), later replacing the unfiltered stream with a moderated one.

The problem isn't a new one. The old user-group flame wars have simply evolved with the internet into real-time streaming flame wars (and geo-located flame wars could be coming soon). But the digital community evolves organically as well in response to new formats and challenges and a great deal of constructive conversation has centered around what happened to Boyd. Her own no-holds-barred blog post about the incident has attracted 180 comments to date, which nearly unanimously sympathize with what happened to her (at an otherwise excellent conference) and applaud her courage in writing about it so frankly.

So what's the solution?

Moderating the backchannel clearly helps, but the fundamental question is: should any speaker have to share the stage with an audience's tweets, particularly when those tweets turn insulting, trivial or attention-grabbing?

While many digital events don't display the Twitterstream, some recent events have taken an even more radical approach by declaring themselves "Twitter-free zones," asking attendees not to tweet at all, instead to simply listen. Those are the exception, however, and most Twitter users expect - and enjoy - being able to interact freely on the social web, and most of the content tweeted from conferences is informative, interesting and respectful.

One intriguing possibility could be to moderate the backchannel by using Twitter Lists -- a new function that allows users to create a list of Twitter accounts that can be followed as a group. Conference attendees could be automatically included in a list that anyone interested in news from the conference is free to follow. That would prevent spammers from joining the stream, but would prevent virtual participation and would still require moderation to remove hecklers.

Gentry Underwood, who also spoke at Web 2.0 Expo, took another interesting approach: he added his own prerecorded tweets to the tweetstream, so that they functioned as bullet-points for his talkand kept the audience focused on him and his key ideas.

And comedian Baratunde Thurston took the bull by the horns at the beginning of his Web 2.0 Expo keynote, joking, "if there are ugly nasty offensive tweets about me going on behind that I can't see, I will find you with my hashtag army, we will hunt you down and we will destroy you."

"Twitiquette" is an evolving set of conventions, too new to be fully worked out yet, taking shape as a result of events in the real-time stream. Perhaps the simplest solution of all, as we're working out technical ways to handle some of the questions posed by real-time interaction, would be the adoption of Good Manners 2.0 (a free upgrade from Manners 1.0).

Perhaps all conferences should begin with a talk on that.

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When Ideas Flow Faster than Tweets...

Danah Boyd spoke at Web 2.0 Expo today and her talk -- and the audience’s reaction -- was what my little boy’s teachers refer to as a “Teachable Moment.”

Danah Boyd is a brilliant and complex theoretician in a world where speakers often limit themselves to expressing simple, easily digestible, ideas like “join the conversation,” “be authentic,” and “first listen.” But while simple, all three of those ideas are very good advice. Particularly “first listen.”

If Boyd made any mistakes, it was trying to deliver too much content in not enough time. As a result, she spoke quickly. And her ideas were nuanced and intricate. Not the first time that’s ever happened but with this audience there was an interesting difference. Many of us were planning to "live tweet" about her presentation as she gave it but we found that couldn’t tweet as fast as she spoke.

There is a whole new class of reporters -- live tweeters -- who resemble the court reporters of yore. At times, today, there were literally hundreds of tweets per minute flowing from the conference. I was one of them. I type very quickly.

But Boyd speaks very quickly, and not in slice-able sound bites. So we tweeters were left in the dust.

So what does a tweeter do when a tweeter is frustrated? A tweeter tweets. The first frustrated tweet --which was relatively mild and humorous – admonished Boyd to “take a breath.” And that tweet appeared in the Twitter stream on the giant screen behind her. The audience laughed, and Boyd didn’t know why. And once that tweet fired the first salvo, more snarky tweets started flowing and the audience started paying more attention to the Twitter stream on the screen behind her than to the stream of Boyd’s ideas (which were, ironically about flow and the stream).

So the tweeters were tweeting comments instead of listening to her, and the rest of the audience was smiling and laughing at the comments instead of listening to her.

And yet every one of we tweeters no doubt believes the Social Media mantra: “before you engage in social media, first listen, then engage.”

If there is an interesting conference going on in San Francisco or Chicago, I like to watch the stream because I can’t be there. And when I am at a conference I enjoy tweeting to share the interesting content and add my own thoughts. But the primary value to be had from any conference keynote is in listening to the speaker.

If a speaker speaks to quickly for us to transcribe her thoughts, perhaps we don’t have to do it. Tweeting doesn’t have to be a competitive sport. Perhaps we can let our tweeting fingers rest for a few minutes. Perhaps we all can take a breath and first listen… then engage.

The Day My Twitter Boutique Turned into a Spam Bazaar

A few weeks ago I made a one-click mistake that transformed my idyllic Twitterverse from a wonderful gourmet boutique to a deafening street bazaar, replete with shilling merchants, junk that fell apart, and seedy grifters inviting me to "follow them to another site" for some special deals and special "peeks" at their hot pictures. Very special indeed!

My troubles started innocently enough: I was browsing through my followers looking for interesting new people to follow back, using a great little tool called Twitter Karma that allows you to do just that.

I was already following 700 tweeters, each of whom I considered a winner - interesting people, worthy causes, and sources of thought-provoking info. But there were 800 tweeters following me that I wasn't following back so I was sifting through them, seeing who they were.

And then it happened: with one fatal click of the mouse, I accidentally chose "bulk follow," and started following all 800, more than doubling my already well-populated stream.

In they all poured, flooding my feed, jamming my inbox, offering me "irresistible" messages like "**ATTENTION** New to Twitter and want to grow your followers??" and "Market your products and make money with Twitter!!" and "Click here 2 see more of me..." The only thing missing was "Want 2 make your teeth 10 shades whiter overnight?" With that one click, my controlled Twitter ecosystem was suddenly buffeted by a blinding swath of incoming locusts, dust devils, and hail.

I'm not an expert enough Twitter Historian yet (is Stanford hiring?) to know how long the spammers, charlatans, and frauds have been hanging out on the periphery. At first, Twitter was a bit like an all-day concert where the real tickets, the real CDs, and the FDA-approved sirloin burgers were being sold inside the fairgrounds. Alas, it was only a matter of time until scalpers, bootleggers, and mystery-meat stands started massing at the gates, waiting for the fences to give way. And give way they did.

Should we blame it on Ashton Kutcher? Some observers do. Before he challenged CNN to a popularity contest to see who could get the most followers, 800 was considered respectable and 5,000 an incredibly impressive number of followers on Twitter. And that was good, because why would a spammer target 5,000 people when it was so much more lucrative hacking into email accounts? Kutcher, or AplusK as he's known on Twitter to his astounding 3.1 million followers, raised the threshold, garnering not only inflated numbers but incessant media attention, big name converts, and millions of people signing up to see what the fuss was about. But while Mr. AplusK seems like a likable, tech-savvy, do-gooder, not all the folks that he -- and the subsequent media storm -- attracted to Twitter are as benevolent as he. And too many are playing a kind of Twitter quid pro quo: "I'll follow you if you'll follow me back, and if you don't I'll un-follow you and follow someone else who will."

I have "Twitter Friends" who follow and are followed by anywhere from 5,000 to 100,000 people. Most of them are respected professionals who have earned those large followings by being helpful, friendly, and informative ("adding value" in Social Media parlance). Social media giant Chris Brogan, for instance, used to follow back everyone who followed him, both out of courtesy and because he's genuinely interested in discovering new people with valuable points of view. But even Chris is rethinking his position now, overwhelmed by spammers and automated direct message bots.

And so I've spent the last few weeks undoing the damage my one keystroke wrought. First I unfollowed all the people who promised "thousands of new followers," then the people who promised "guaranteed ways to make money," then people only tweeting links to their products and services, then people whose tweetstreams were widely divergent from my interests (I'm not into "rad snowboarding," for instance), and of course the stock photos of hot women whose hilarious English-challenged tweets ("I'm kind of girl who like 2 lay back and relax") all end with "want 2 see my pics?"

Things are almost back to normal now. My Twitter stream is tidy, the quality is high again, and, in the end, I discovered at least 300 very interesting new people I am happy to be following. And if I inadvertently unfollowed some interesting new folks, I'm confident I'll find them again. Because, while Twitter is being invaded by the Barbarians at the Gates, it is still a wonderland of fascinating people to discover.

There are lots of ways to use Twitter, almost all of them right, and everyone finds the way that works best for them. I've discovered that I am most comfortable being a Boutique Tweeter and not a supermarket, content with a group of people whose tweets I really enjoy, not aiming to have the most stock or the widest range, but enjoying a play-list of handpicked Tweeters, each of whose tweets adds value and quality to my day whenever I power up Tweetdeck. I still use Twitter Karma, it's still a great tool, but I steer clear now of that little Pandora's Box known as "bulk follow."

AT&T Operators Should Answer More Social Media Calls

"Is anyone from AT&T on Twitter?" I tweeted several weeks ago, "I have a horror story."

The silence was deafening, despite the fact that there are at least six Twitter accounts that feature AT&T's blue-striped sphere as their avatar. Granted, with a foreboding Tweet like that, I might not have wanted to respond either, but I'm a customer, so AT&T should have been paying attention.

I have to admit I was perplexed that that the AT&T sphere is not participating more actively in the Twittersphere. They are active on Facebook, for instance, where they forged a strategic alliance with rapper Lil Wayne (who currently has 93,800 followers on one Twitter account).

So why the lack of response on arguably the fastest growing Social Media phenomenon (and real time search engine)? AT&T is a phone company, for heaven's sake, and should be listening when customers reach out, whether it's from an iPhone, Facebook, or two tomato cans and a very sensitive string!

And yet their Twitter line was buzzing and none of their accounts were answering.

My motives for reaching out to them on Twitter were simple: I am an active Twitter user and I saw that AT&T had Twitter accounts too. I didn't need more customer service, which is what often prompts tweeters reach out to @comcastcares, for instance, run by Comcast's engaging and effective Director of Digital Care, Frank Eliason, who handles questions ranging from outages, to hard rebooting, to missing closed captions. My specific problems, which included a startling policy, a mind-boggling procedure, and systemic errors, had already been solved.

I simply wanted to connect with AT&T on a corporate level to give them feedback about what they got right and what went appallingly wrong.

Here's what they did right: three remarkably dedicated phone reps -- all of whom I will call Wendy because one actually was named Wendy -- spent a combined total of six hours of company time, making sure I got exactly what I needed.

On Friday, Wendy #1 spent one hour porting my number from T-Mobile, creating a Family Plan, talking her supervisor into preserving my thousands of rollover minutes, and giving me a free refurbished Blackberry Bold. She was so delightful to work with, I let her talk me into a gel cover I didn't need. When none of the emails she had promised me with the contract and tracking numbers had arrived by Monday morning, however, I called back to discover AT&T had absolutely no record of my order. In spite of the reference number I had gotten from Wendy #1, the transaction had vanished into thin air.

Enter Wendy #2 who spent 3 hours trying to track my order down, actually calling me back with frequent updates. Finally, she discovered that my Harlem zip code had raised a red flag (I'm not kidding..,) because there are "fraud issues associated with it" and that my order had not even been entered into the system yet because AT&T (get ready...) had certain procedures they needed to follow first to verify my address.

I was stunned, not only because I had been "profiled," so to speak because I live in Harlem, but because of what it told me about AT&T's efficiency. AT&T was already my phone company: so if they don't know where I live, who does? And because I was already a customer, all they had to do was 1) call me back, 2) email me, or 3) look me up in the phone book to find out, but apparently AT&T has a "procedure" they have to follow to verify addresses that takes several days.

Wendy #2 truly cared, though, and worked hard to get me what I needed, which I appreciated. She facilitated a little magic and the phone arrived late Tuesday afternoon. Unfortunately it arrived with the wrong number written on the Sim card. Not only did my phone company not know where I live, they didn't know my phone number either!

Enter Wendy #3, as gracious and dedicated as the others, and two hours later my phone was up and running with the correct number.

Dedicated customer service reps like the ones who helped me can do a lot to build brand loyalty, but only if the company they are representing cares enough to give excellent service as a company. And so, frustrated by how many hours of my (and their) life this had required, I reached out on Twitter, where I knew AT&T had several corporate accounts, to compliment their customer service reps while pointing out the places where their systems had broken down. But no one tweeted back.

Smart companies monitor the conversation. Craig Newmark, who astonishingly still does customer service for Craigslist, regularly uses Twitter Search to see what people are saying and to volunteer to help solve their problems. More and more government agencies are listening to and connecting with citizens through social media, like the HHS Center for New Media, whose excellent Andrew Wilson has been an important and reassuring source of information about the swine flu outbreak.

As Digital Marketer Matt Snodgrass said at a recent round table I attended: "Customer service is often facilitated with a simple 'I hear you' and that's where Twitter can shine."

But AT&T, whose employees had been such good listeners on the phone, either wasn't listening or wasn't responding on Twitter, so my attempt to give them feedback fell on deaf ears. Given that AT&T has already established a presence on Twitter, it makes a lot of sense to integrate it with other customer service functions; it makes sense to join the conversation and let customers know that the company itself is as caring as they ask their employees to be.

Come on, AT&T, it's time to reach out and touch someone again. And this time you need to do it online.