ItsDevelopmental - content + technology + people

Picture: Charlcombe Valley

Had a great week off last week. I live five minutes from Charlcombe Valley, on the edge of Bath. And this is a picture of the view from the field we were walking in. 

Moving from New Cross in SE London to this area is making a lot of sense!

 

Thetrainline.com sucks

Bought a £76 single from Bath Spa to Sutton to travel Monday last week. On the Sunday called thetrainline to say I would not be travelling on Monday (I was ill) and I was told that I could use the ticket for up to 5 days. 

Took the train on Tuesday and when I got to Paddington could not get through the barriers. Station staff refused to give me a ticket to get across London to Sutton. After a long debate a First Great Western member of staff stamped my ticket and explained it would not get through barriers so I would have to explain at each station why I had a ticket that was incorrect - the stamp did not explain this.

I ended up paying £13 for a ticket to get me to Sutton. Thanks for your help guys.

And I have just tried to change another ticket. In the time it took me to call thetrainline.com the fare had changed from £28.50 to £53 - literally right in front of my eyes.

Finally, thetrainline.com charges a £10 admin fee to change a ticket. This requires you to print out your tickets and send them to an office in Edinburgh. That is a huge admin fee to do what exactly?

Book early and stick to the train time and you are quids in - but any need to make changes and it gets costly. And don't expect useful information from the customer service reps.

Surely there should be a fairer and simpler way to purchase train tickets.

How about this for customer relationship management?

UPDATE: Video I posted origibalyy not working, so here is the explanation of the Salesforce Service Cloud.

Managing the Facebook generation

Thanks to Oldshep for pointing this out and the number of commnets. Interesting points by Gary Hamel on managing the Facebook generation.

Picture: is downloading security software this good?

For me it was not so. I set it to download and did some other things. Maybe this is how it is for some. Downloading Mcafee software is damn good . . .

Elevenses training at RBI: polls and surveys

This is second attempt at this post - please don't crash on me this time Typepad. I can't display  the picture from Twitpic of yesterday's session so here it is [credit Nathan @twblog].

Another successful Elevenses session at RBI yesterday. I curated it and we covered polls, surveys, petitions and quizzes.

A big thanks to @sim89, @mike_berry, @twblog, Caroline at FWi and Dan and Jessica at  RBI's research team.

Between us we looked at PollDaddy, PollyDaddy on Twitter (and here is my poll), ask500people.com, surveymonkey, No10 petitions, mystudiyo and Pledgebank.

Lots of interesting discussion and sharing of knowledge. Also received this advice from RBI corporate comms manager Jane Baldwin [Jane runs the polls on our intranet].

Best polls make you think, laugh or argue amongst yourselves. Or promote debate. The most argument generated was from "which of these of your favourite biscuit?". Loads of letters! Other goodies are "could youdo your boss's job?" "Do you fancy someone you work wth?" "If you had to live through one of these years again, which would you choose?" (Give the choice of two random years). We never give a "don't know" option - I always feel that's an easy get out and doesn't foster debate.
Topical is always good too - but never mention religion or sexuality.

The beauty of disruption on traditional businesses

Thought this post on the Velocity blog put quite simply what is being talked about on a huge scale: that disruptive ideas trump all ideas that go before them. The blog is focussed on marketing but I think this message is true of all online business ideas and businesses that are striving to do things deifferently. These are the qualities of successful disruption . . .

It has to be true – Loud, lame or lyrical bullshit just isn’t sustainable.  The more you can prove the validity of your idea, the stronger it is.

It has to be different – Big ideas incite riots. ‘Me-too’ ideas incite yawns.

It has to be controversial –  If everyone who hears it simply agrees, it’s not disruptive.

It has to generate value –Spiritual ideas are wonderful, but in B2B marketing, a disruptive idea has to make someone money or save them money.

The power of Twitter hashtags

Big thanks to @twblog for pointing this out  - - and doing it. This week is British Tourism Week and to mark the occassion travel blogger Darren Cronian started a hashtag #brittourism for followers to post top UK holiday places, tips etc. Here is the original tweet. An inspired idea from Darren.

Nathan at Travel Weekly then fed this hashtag feed into a UK tourism landing page to see what Twitter users post.

All powerful stuff. Interestingly, it was not Visit Britain that came up with the idea but rather a blogger passionate about travel. Note: the importance of bloggers in generating interest/calling people to action/sharing/recommending.

This then got picked up by a travel media brand - and so the hashtag is gaining increasing coverage. nathan points twitter users to the page.

Note also: Visit Britain should be using this hashtag and taking the feed into its site. It then gets a feed of content which it can then comment on, build content around etc. Regional toursit boards could then join the cnversation where relevant. Great content and engagement for British Tourism Week.

All organisations/brands should be getting their heads around this and quickly. Content directly and indirectly talking about your brand is out there now. Time to take advantage of the opportunities.

Step back and look at how journalism is changing

Really like this piece on how technology has changed news The reboot of journalism by Dave Winer - the father of blogging and RSS, according to the BBC.

Best of all I liked this quote that ends the piece. For journalists, it is this jumping out of your skin which is so important.  

As with everything new, to see it you have to jump out of your skin and look at the situation from the new body, not the old one. Imagine what news would look like once the limits of the past are erased by the technology of the new. It's been knowable for many years, but some didn't want to look. But if you looked, as millions did, if you weren't one of the gatekeepers; rather you were one of the people they gates were meant to keep out -- there was no problem seeing how it would shape up. Now we're there, we're not at the beginning, we're already far along.

It's not too late to jump out.

Presentation: using news to drive SEO

Using Online News to Drive SEO

View more presentations from Lee Odden.