Tasha Harrison

Something lovely and heartwarming came into my life today through Twitter, this wonderful video of a busker on the London Underground. Isn’t social media brilliant!

via @richardpeacock

Ever wondered about retweeting? Are you new to Twitter and can’t decipher the strange codes people talk in.

Here is my three point guide to retweeting:

1. An example of a retweet is:
   
   RT @tashaharrison This is a great article http://bit.ly/45t783
2. You can comment on a retweet like this:
   
   RT @tashaharrison This is a great article http://bit.ly/45t783 <– the point he made is worth thinking about
3. You can also reference someone else’s tweet by writing at the end of the tweet:
   
   This article is really interesting and worth thinking about http://bit.ly/45t783 (via @tashaharrison)

Retweeting is a great way of sharing information with the people you follow. It is generally how articles and news are able to travel so quickly to so many people on Twitter.

There’s big changes on Google today. The search engine is going to include results from sites such as Twitter and from blogs. This is important, because it means that the search results we receive will be up to date news, as it happens. The explosion of  Twitter, in particular, has been the main catalyst for this change. It gives people the ability to publish news as it is happening. It is important that Google reflects this new real-time news source (Rupert Murdoch should take notice).

The other big change is the increased personalisation of your search. Google records your web history and bases its search results on the sites that you visit. So if you regularly visit a particular news site, it will place that site higher up the search rankings if it is relevant to your search. This is a big game changer for SEO, since it favours more established sites. It also means that when you view your own site on Google you will generally see it ranking differently than most of your potential customers, meaning that you have no idea how well your site is actually ranking.

Most good SEOs will have seen this trend already and will have been aware that personalisation has been increasing over the last couple of years. It provides us with a new challenge and increases the need for different forms of online marketing, like social media and online PR. It also creates a problem for SEO companies who still guarantee positions on Google, as they will find it hard to prove.

From a users point of view I actually think these changes are rather limiting. Surely the point of search engines is that we can find something new. Before the days of social bookmarking sites like StumbleUpon and Digg, we relied on search engines to bring us new sites and information. Now we will increasingly receive the same sites, having to look further through the results to find something new.

Before Twitter all of our thoughts where focussed into our blog and discussions took place on both our own blogs and other people’s blogs.  You referred to other’s blogs in your own posts and continued the conversation that way.

Now we see a blog post that we find interesting, Tweet it and then continue the conversation on Twitter.  Obviously conversations do still continue on the blog post as it is easier to comment and follow the discussion within that format, but has Twitter diluted the discussion and caused us to blog less?  Instead of sharing our ideas in a well thought out blog post do we simply quickly write them out in 140 characters, possibly losing the essence of what we mean?

As Twitter is evolving I am finding that my blog is still the best place to publish my main ideas, but I’m not sure that this is the case for everyone. It will be interesting to see how blogs evolve and whether micro-blogging is sustainable within the whirlwind of spam that is currently afflicting it.

If ever I saw the benefits of social media for a brand it was last night and today via Twitter. I live at the end of a half mile lane in the Sussex countryside (at the moment). Recently some BT engineers were spotted undertaking some work at the bottom of the lane, a few hours later our broadband went down. A stressed phonecall to my neighbour, who is a web designer, revealed that our landline numbers had changed. The BT engineers had somehow got the wires crossed!

From this address we currently run four businesses, two of which are online based, so this obviously caused massive problems. After some heated discussions with BT personnel in a call centre we were promised normal service by the end of play the following day.

Once I had recovered from my anger I decided to test BT’s customer service and, knowing that they were one of the biggest brands to venture onto Twitter, I tweeted my disgust.  This is the tweet: “Little rant about the idiots at BT: not only have they cut off our internet but they’ve changed our phone number! So annoyed, not surprised.”

The following day, once I had got my internet back I found this from @BTCare: @TashaHarrison Oh dear this does not sound good at all, Can I help you?

It might have come after the problem was fixed, but it made me feel like they were listening. It also delighted me that I was part of a successful internet marketing strategy by a massive brand.

If anyone ever doubts the power of Twitter and the role it can play in customer service then think about how easy it was for them to make me feel better about their company. It doesn’t take long to monitor the internet and then say a few kind words.