Twitter – Mediocre Mum

Outstanding Customer Service via Twitter

There is a very good reason I buy the majority of our Toys from Cuthbert Toys in St Albans, not just because it’s local, Kirit (@cuthberts_toys) is a rather nice guy or the fact, that he’s bought me the odd glass of wine. It’s simply because the level of customer service that he has offered via Twitter has been outstanding.

I just wanted to share with you a couple of examples. This is in no way a sponsored post. I just like to share when I find something good and to say a special thank you to him.

What did he do?

At Christmas, I bought my daughter a puppet theatre, which then needed a few puppets. The trouble was that my daughter was on school holidays and I couldn’t get into the shop to buy one, especially with her in tow. So Kirit, took a photo of all the puppets, which I could then choose the ones I wanted and he offered to bag them up so I could just pop into the shop to pay and collect, with her being none the wiser! Now that’s what I call service.

There have been more than two occasions of him going above and beyond but this one really sticks out in my mind. My daughter has a thing for ‘minis’ not sure if it’s because they are child-like, but being awkward she wanted a ‘yellow’ one. We tried to source one online but to no avail. In the end, my husband asked me to check with my ‘friend’ from the local toy store to see if he could find one and low and behold he did. I’m not sure why I didn’t think of him first.

It took me awhile to work out how much effort he actually went to. Check this out…..

He painted it by hand himself!!!

Business owners take note!

Do you have any examples of outstanding customer service via twitter?

I want my Yellow Tweetdeck back!

My computer kept freezing and I finally worked out that it was Tweetdeck that was causing this. I’ve had it happen before and usually sorted it with an uninstall and a reinstall of the newest version of Tweetdeck along with Adobe Air, which can be very flaky.

The Problem

However, I receive a very nasty shock when I did so. The people of Twitter have been messing about with it and I really didn’t like the new ‘Blue’ version. It took me ages to work out how to turn of the sound notifications and I couldn’t turn off the real-time updates. I follow nearly 2000 people so you can see it was a bit of a problem, my timeline was making me motion sick and it sounded like a techno rave!

I’m a heavy user of Tweetdeck, with over 100,000 tweets and I manage several accounts. I’ve tried others like Seismic and Hootsuite. I use Hootsuite on my phone and Ipad but I really don’t get on with it on my desktop, as it’s missing a couple of my favourite features, like auto-complete of names, new followers column and the ability to filter tweets.

Thanks to @tipyourhat, @chickenprincess and @secretstef I managed to resurrect the old yellow version of Tweetdeck.

Here is what I did:

1) Via the control panel I uninstalled both Tweetdeck and Adobe Air.

2) This is the important bit. Then I ran a registry cleaner to remove any redundant files that may have been left behind. The first time I tried to reinstall I didn’t do this and the problem with crashing resumed. I use the free version of CCleaner.

3) Then I reinstalled Adobe Air as you need it to run Tweetdeck.

4) Then using the link at the bottom of this post, Old Tweetdeck please come back, I reinstalled the older version of Tweetdeck.

Thanks everyone! Normal tweeting has resumed!

My Twitter Journey

The other day I was doing some laundry and I don’t know why, but when I glanced at our rather large basket of unmatched socks it made me think of twitter!

When I first started twitter I felt like a lonely sock on the clothes line, blowing in the wind, talking to myself.

In time, I started to collect some other odd socks but sometimes I couldn’t see the connection.

After awhile I started to make quite a few matches, with the odd sock still hanging around.

Along the way I’ve had to throw out a few socks as they had holes in them and some I’ll never find a match to, but I have kept quite a few odd socks as they make it more interesting.

Is this similar to your experience with Twitter? Please do leave a comment.

Thanks to the lovely Susan (@CocaBeenSlinky), a very good twitter mate who is always laughing, for the illustrations. They’re fab aren’t they? She doesn’t advertise herself as an artist, but I’m sure, if you’re like me and blog but can’t draw and struggle to find copyright free images, she may knock you some up for a small fee! I’m paying her in wine.

Junk Mail

This is my front door. For the most part it works fairly well in reducing the amount of junk mail that we receive. However, I think we may need to get it translated into a few more languages! :-o

Sometimes I wish I could hang one on my Twitter account. The amount of crap I receive is unbelievable and I’m sure I’m not alone.

Please do not:

1) Ask me to vote for your nephew in a baby photo competition. A) I don’t know you and B) the kid’s ugly.

2) Send me auto DMs saying thanks for the follow with a link. I liken it to a quick hello over the bar, and then you throw your business card in my face and walk away.

3) If I’ve never spoken to you before, don’t ask me to support your charity. I’m sure it’s a good cause but I don’t give money to panhandlers in the street either.

4) Send me unsolicited tweets promoting your products. It’s up there with cold calling and the Jehovah’s banging on my door on a Saturday morning. I will virtually slam the door in your face as well.

5) Blatantly ask me to follow you. Why would I follow someone with no followers, no tweets and no avatar?

6) Ask me to RT something for you. You’ve annoyed me by asking, so why would I then in turn annoy all my followers?

Have I missed any?

Thanking you in advance,

Mediocre Mum

A Smiley is Free

My husband does make me laugh sometimes. As most of you know he’s a bit of a Luddite, a person who fears technology, which I don’t mind as this means it keeps him off my PC and Twitter. Plus, he’s happy because he can watch whatever he likes on the telly. A few weeks ago, he was asking about all these squiggles that people leave at the end of text messages. It took me awhile to work out what he was on about. Oh, you mean smileys! ;-)

I have to admit when I started using Twitter a couple of years I didn’t know what they were either; but after a quick trip to Google I worked it out and now use them all the time I think they’re essential as so much can be taken in the wrong way.

As the lovely, kind, and animal loving Kathryn @crystaljigsaw will contest to, she made a comment on Twitter earlier in the week, which was completely taken out of context and quite frankly blew up, leaving her very distraught. I don’t think the use of smileys in this case would’ve helped but it does show how easily things can be taken the wrong way.

As 93% of communication is non-verbal (eye-movement, facial expression, hand-gestures) which isn’t possible with most forms of online communication excluding SKYPE of course, so, sometimes smileys are imperative as they allow you to set the tone of your message. They allow people to know you’re being sarcastic, happy or cheeky.

Here are a few of my favourites:

;-) Wink

:-) Happy

:-O Surprised

:-s Embarrassed

:-( Sad

:-p poking tongue out

:-/ Unsure

:-x Kiss

And I’ve seen some very clever ones?

@-]—– I couldn’t see it at first but it’s a rose!

I’m sure you have some better ones. Someone once sent me one of Harry Potter. It was genius. Do share.

And these were courtesty of @iaingilmour today! Too funny, and yes he is bonkers.

:-o==> man playing trombone

:-)8 boobs

(:-( trouble on Pancake Day

:-[ Dracula

8-O naked and just sat on leather chair

q:-( child with saucepan stuck on head

:-^# bird in nest

:-(~ sorry darling this hasn’t happened to me before

[:-)X= Fred Astaire (top hat and tails)

0 Melted Snowman

z:-) Harry Potter

:-[)> Frank Zappa

‘”:-( child with untreated headlice

:-D<=3 thank you darling for being patient with me

%-s cross eyed

]:-)> devil incarnate