Last night my some picked a kids book called Some Have More, Some Have Less, and Some have the Same Amount. The kid in the book (he and his mom are Rabbits) is shopping with his mom and keeps asking for more or less of things in the cart. His mom agrees that some people have more, and some have less, but they have just the right amount.

The story reminded me of some marketing meetings I’ve been in lately and one in particular. A manager in the meeting had been to a seminar where they talked about how great the web was based on a single case study. He was hooked and wanted to do everything that company was doing.

First he pulled up product pages and said they needed more pictures. Never mind that the page was performing well and that the extra photos break the design without adding significant value. Never mind that the site he was comparing too had a completely different target market, different product, and different business model. He saw more and wanted more.

Then we discussed keywords. He wanted more. Lots of keywords on every page relating to everything they do, regardless of the page topic. Instead of focusing on the page content, he was focused on every word he thought might relate to him. The list was so long that we would never be able to work all the keywords into the page copy in a meaningful way.

I took notes as we went along and waited for my turn to respond. Here’s where I earn my keep. Instead of taking the order and running back to the kitchen to cook it up, I went back through his list and talked about the different sections and the tactics. I explained the original intent of some pages and what happens to the design when we add the photos. I agreed that they needed to give their keywords more attention but suggested that we focus on a few and/or relate that work to specific pages.

I appreciated his enthusiasm but he had become so focussed on the tactics that he forgot about the goals. He remembered that the overall goal was to sell more and to grow but forgot all the intermediate goals that make that happen. He wasn’t thinking about selling each product individually or about setting the right image for the company. He wasn’t thinking about which web visitors were most likely to buy from them online.

It didn’t matter how many photos another site had. What mattered was whether we had the right amount for their needs. It didn’t matter how many keywords we could squeeze in the page. What mattered was the best keywords for them and how we used them. In the end, we agreed on a set of tasks that will be just right for them. I hope I can be that successful in my next meeting.

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I did some business thinking and identified my key problems:

• I had selected the systems I liked best and wished they were integrated.
• I kept putting off other approaches waiting for the perfect integration (that would only come if I built it myself).
• I let the idea of a better system keep me from improving the current one.

I’ve reviewed my primary needs and tested several different products and product combinations. I’m pretty happy with what I’ve arrived at but I’ll have to let it run for a few more weeks before feeling totally satisfied. If it proves to be what I’m hoping it is, I’ll post the full structure as my own best practice review.

Trillions from MAYAnMAYA on Vimeo.

We’ll have several case studies and a technical Q & A session

• How to use a plugin and a custom template file to provide clients or other non-technical users a way to edit featured snippets. - Randy Hoyt, amesburyweb.com
• Using Template Tags / Query posts to control which posts show up in the loop. - Matt Simo
• A Q & A session

This event is being sponsored by eLocomotive and Amesbury Web.

Based in Richardson’s Telecom Corridor, eLocomotive provides a range of web design and custom programming services for small and medium business.

People have been voicing their opinions on blogs for years now but Twitter already seems to have more traction in customer service. Why is that?

The length of comments on Twitter are succinct. It takes much less effort to read them and triage quickly. Don’t underestimate the impact of this. It may be the best part of Twitter for customer service. You can skim 5-6 tweets in the same amount of time it takes to read a single web page. The length also means that tweets are always to the point. They have to be.

The customers are centralized in one place that is easily searched. Really, providing customer service by tracking customers across the entire web is pretty daunting. Twitter gives companies something open that they can focus on. Hashtags make it even easier to filter the noise and people use them naturally so companies don’t have to train their customers.

There is a simple, standard way to send your response. Replying in Twitter is much easier than contacting each blog owner/writer which is a manual process, where the contact forms are frequently designed to foil automation or don’t even exist.

Customer Service Tools are already being built around Twitter. I’ve thought for a few years that companies need a good workflow for information on the web. Good tools were few and far between. Twitter already has companies racing to provide corporate customers the tools they need. Salesforce.com, for example, never did much to address the web but has already started incorporating Twitter for clients. Even the basic desktop and mobile clients for Twitter offer the basic tools needed to track and deal with requests.

As the old GI Joe cartoon used to say, knowing is half the battle. Taking action is always  critical but the effort required to listen to customers is getting much easier with Twitter.

WordPress Weekly is a live-recorded podcast about WordPress, hosted by Jeff Chandler and David Peralty most every Friday night. It is your weekly source of news and discussions related to WordPress, as well as any projects under the Automattic umbrella. The show frequently includes interviews wuth Automattic employees, theme designers, plugin developers, WordCamp organizers, and other members of the WordPress community.

On July 10, for WordPress Weekly Episode 63, two members of the local (D/FW) WordPress community will be appearing on the show as guests, both of whom gave talks at WordCamp Dallas in June: Scott Clark and Randy Hoyt. We are turning this recording into a full evening for local technical WordPress users and developers to meet and discuss using WordPress as a CMS at eLocomotive’s office in Richardson. We’ll have pizza and drinks from 6:00-7:00, the live recording of the podcast from 7:00-8:00, and a question and answer session with Scott and Randy from 8:00-9:00.

1302 E. Collins Blvd. Richardson, TX 75081

Click Here to Register

A major concern with social media, for large companies is that they can’t control the conversation any longer. In the past, individuals couldn’t afford to blanket the airwaves with a commercial about their problem. Companies could and they grew very large. There was no balance of power between customer and large business. Companies have taken advantage of that intentionally and unintentionally. Social media (twitter, blogs, Facebook, etc.) give consumers a voice and it’s slowly restoring the balance of power. Now it’s up to the companies to address this change.

My question is this: If Comcast can provide 3 hour response to a Twitter complaint, why can’t they do that for complaints that originate from a phone call? Either they can and haven’t been because there wasn’t an incentive or they can’t and the more popular twitter becomes, the worse twitter customer service will get.

I like to think social media is a reconning for companies that haven’t been giving customers the attention they deserve. Power is balancing out and companies are going to have to do more than open a Twitter account to survive. They’re going to have to address people’s problems and their own service.

Let me hear your comments and please take the polls:

What was your twitter customer service experience?

How does twitter impact customer service?

I’ll post my compilation/and thoughts later today or tomorrow.