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Adding pause to your iPhone Conference Dial-ins in Contacts

August 10, 2010 by Shawn Add a Comment

If you have an iPhone and are like me, well hopefully none of you have as many calls as I have in a days time. But suppose you have quite a few and would love a way to call them and enter your passcodes when you are mobile, without having to repeatedly dial them every time.

You can!

  1. First, just create a contact and enter the number.
    Create a new contact and enter the number
  2. Next, select the +*# button on the lower left and enter pause (for pauses within the dialing pattern), # and then numbers wherever applicable.
    Next, select the +*# button on the lower left and enter pause (for pauses within the dialing pattern), # and then numbers wherever applicable.
  3. Save and then dial this contact!

That’s it! Happy dialing!

Filed Under: Social Media & Tech Tagged With: ,

Back with a Bang at TWTRCON

June 21, 2010 by Shawn Add a Comment

AT&T Times Square Store

It’s been a week since TWTRCON in New York City, of which our @ATTCustomerCare team was an anchor sponsor of, along with Jesse Engle, CEO of Cotweet). After arriving back from a great trip to New York, I’m finally caught up on my mail and tasks and able to post this blog update.

Looking back at my few days in New York and at TWTRCON, here are some of the highlights for me:

  • I personally LOVE New York. Would I ever live there? No (not a big fan of stairs or small apartments and I love driving). But I do enjoy visiting and “generally” knowing my way around the city.
  • Wonderful to have several members of the @ATTCustomerCare team live at the conference. Molly (@ATTCustomerCare), Susan (@ATTSusan) and Natasha (@ATTNatasha)!
  • The Addams Family – A New Musical was great. Very close in the orchestra. Nathan Lane, Bebe Neuwirth and KevinChamberlin, who was nominated for his third Tony award for his performance as the lovable Fester (my personal high point, even though I dearly loved Mr. Lane’s performance too).
  • Dinner at Danny Meyer’s Union Square Cafe was great – partially due to the food and partially due to the superb company of Phil Terry (the CEO at Creative Good, Stephanie Schierholz of NASA, Frank Eliason from Comcast.
  • Ran by and took pictures and checked in on foursquare from the AT&T Times Square store…
  • AT&T Times Square store
  • … and the famous Apple store on Madison Avenue!The famous Apple store on Madison Avenue

Apple Store - Madison Avenue

  • TWTRCON was amazing and a great experience for the @ATTCustomerCare team. Lots of great minds in one room, not always agreeing but definitely spawning new and creative thought. Our real time customer service panel with Phil Terry, Stephanie Schierholz, Frank Eliason and Joshua Karpf was awesome! (Plus a special bonus shout-out to Stefanie Nelson of Dell and Chelsea Marti of Intuit for jumping up and joining us at the end! TWTRCON NYC 2010 Customer Service PanelTWTRCON NYC 2010 Customer Service Panel – Left to Right: @PhilTerry, Stephanie Schierholz of NASA, Shawn McPike representing @ATTCustomerCare, Frank Eliason of Comcast and Joshua Karpf of PepsiCo
  • A huge highlight for me (which anyone who has followed my blog will recognize) is that I felt great and did well considering the fact that one month and one week prior, I was having brain surgery to implant a DBS device (essentially a pacemaker for the brain) to combat my Parkinson’s Disease. Since I’m guessing many of you didn’t know and/or couldn’t tell, I’ll call that a personal success. And yes, that’s why I’m almost bald instead of as pictured in my profile picture.
  • The experience at the airport with my new DBS device and corresponding battery pack in my chest was an interesting one. Leaving St. Louis was a bit disorganized as my bags continued through security while I awaited a male attendant to ‘pat me down.’ Coming back, Laguardia was much more organized and the attendant asked which things were mine and pulled them to the side before searching me.
  • And finally, Martha, Martha, Martha. Yes I had a brief opportunity to meet Martha Stewart before her keynote at TWTRCON along with Jesse Engle, CEO of Cotweet.
Filed Under: Customer Care Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , ,

The Best Engagement Strategy is One of Disengagement

April 28, 2010 by Shawn Add a Comment (1 Comment)

Inspired from some great posts by folks like Jay Baer, John Moore and Amber Naslund, I wanted to weigh in on the topic of customer engagement. Everywhere you turn, people everywhere are chanting the mantra of engagement, sometimes at the expense of a formal, planned out strategy. Some even go so far to say that true open, honest and transparent engagement precludes the pre-planning and process mapping inherent in defining and executing a robust enterprise strategy.

Now this is not to say that engagement is not important. Firstly, all businesses have to engage on some level – with business partners, consumers or through electronic mediums – somehow they must engage to sell their product. However, the level of engagement needs to be addressed by first looking at your customer base. If you sell wax rings for toilet bases, perhaps you don’t need a robust transparent engagement strategy with consumers on FriendFeed, Twitter or Facebook. And as good as it feels to record a YouTube video demonstrating installation of your wax ring, it’s doubtful that iJustine is going to favorite it.

So how do you go about determining how to address your engagement strategy? You disengage. Disengage from the old ways of thinking. Disengage from the tendency to believe that you know better than your customer what they need. Disengage from putting your foot in the customer’s electronic front door when they try to tell you that they want to be less engaged with you. Disengage from overactive, repetitive and unnecesssary engagement. Customers are smart and know how to find information and do not need you to broadcast to them through email, DM or status update eight times a day information they can easily pull through an RSS feed, Twitter search or Google query.

Yes, disengage from engagement.

Only then can you fully and, without bias, address your customers from their point of view. Asking a customer that you blast repeatedly how they want to to tailor your blasts to them will always yield predictable results. The feedback inevitably will be retreat from your message, even those parts that they find of value. As a teenager, I thought (as we all did) that I knew better than my parents. So when my father would walk in the house and say “Son, when are you going to wash that car? It’s filthy”, even though I was heading out the door to go wash it, I would turn around and say “I don’t know. Whenever.” I’d then proceed to (even though it didn’t benefit me) wait another week to wash it. I viewed my dad’s method of engagement as one that I would repel from. Had he come in and said “Son, I see your car is dirty. Let’s spend some time talking while we wash it together” I likely would’ve had a much different (and more positive) reply.

It is when you show your customers respect and disengage from them, and tell them that you are listening to their desires to be spared unnecessary and unwanted communication from you, that they will begin to listen. You see, it was they who created social networks to escape from the unwanted interruptions of the rest of us. If we invade their Facebook like we did their home phone via cold calls, and email with unsolicited spam, and web sites with presenting five layers of self-service before allowing someone to find a phone number to call you – a predictable result will occur. The next great medium will emerge and customers will flock to it and away from your engagement, leaving you to diagnose how your great engagement strategy ultimately led to disengagement.

Engaging too much will ultimately lead to disengagement with your customers. It is only by disengaging – and listening – really listening to them – that you will ultimately be able to succeed in engaging them. They want to tell you. You just have to ask them the question from a position of trust. You’ll be surprised at the response.

Filed Under: Social Media & Tech Tagged With: , , ,

Spring Cleaning my Recommended Blogs

April 26, 2010 by Shawn Add a Comment

I’ve started my blogging efforts again now, but this time on the mobile-friendly WordPress. I’ve been evaluating all of my links and pointers to a litany of old content and doing a spring cleaning of sorts. Some links have simply been deleted, while some of the more compelling from my (now retired) blogroll have been added to a new category on my blog called “Blog Recommendations”.

The original inspiration behind my blogroll change (and the subsequent category name which I completely stole from her) was Amber Naslund. Her blog post last year at Altitude (which coincidentally is my first Recommended Blog for this new approach) so effectively laid out the reasoning for doing so – I’ll not even regurgitate it here. Go read her blog post on it instead.

Blogs of interest that I follow at this point are (in no specific order):

I will post more from time to time as I continue to vet my favorites.

Filed Under: Recommended Blogs Tagged With: ,

Commented on “Convince and Convert”

April 25, 2010 by Shawn Add a Comment

Great article Jay. I love the inverted pyramid, and agree wholeheartedly with your point about the best way to build loyalty with existing customers (and to communicate that loyalty to ancillary networks through WOM). And if an organization is adept at this, they can build a connective bond between (a) brand communities and (b) social CRM channels. Twitter is an obvious outlet for this, but also many companies like ours are even reaching out into the vastness of Facebook with much success. It takes a lot of hard work, a real commitment by leadership and a good plan, but we should all kick ourselves if we are not attempting to create or strengthen that connective bond every single day.

Originally posted as a comment
by shawnmcpike
on Convince and Convert using DISQUS.

Filed Under: Social Media & Tech

Debunking and Spelunking: The Rules of Social Media, Part I

April 22, 2010 by Shawn Add a Comment (5 Comments)

Welcome to my new blog, the Social Media Spelunker. A place where I’m going to feel out exactly what to discuss within this forum. And I’m going to rely on you to give me feedback on the types of material you’d like to see here.

Now, you may be asking yourself “What is a Social Media Spelunker?” By definition, a spelunker is “one who makes a habit of studying and exploring caves.” Caves can be dark and mysterious places and can also be very attractive to the adventurous or overconfident. However, there are many pitfalls and hidden dangers awaiting those who blindly stampede into them unprepared.

Forays into social media, if you had not guessed by now, are much like those into caves. Those who have entered them feel qualified to hold themselves out as experts. After all, they seem innocuous enough. But the dangers are real, and their consequences can be big. Even the most experienced companies can fall prey to their allure (if you don’t believe that, ask Delta, Dell or Nestle).

So what can you do to prepare? Exactly that – prepare. Don’t go in blind. Know what you want before going in, and what outcome you want to have afterward. Then perform the three “P”s:

  1. Plan - Lay out the roadmap of what you want to achieve.
  2. Prepare - Define your success metrics, and how you are going to achieve them (including assistive tools and targeted social media channels).
  3. Proceed - Implement everything you have planned out.

All that’s left now is to get started. Before we do, I’ll cover some of the basic rules of social media. These are not all of the rules, they are not even THE rules (if any such rules even exist), but they are the ones that I think are important. We’ll start with two of the biggest ones.

The Ten Rules of Social Media

1.  When Building a Social Media Strategy, your approach should not be terribly different than traditional marketing techniques. The opposite approach is simple, and equally wrong. If your strategy starts with “What is our Facebook (or other social media channel) strategy”, your very premise is flawed. Do you even know if your customers are even on Facebook? Let alone how many of them or their demographics if they are? Instead, begin by asking four basic questions.

  • What products or services are you trying to market?
  • Who are these products or services targeted toward?
  • Are they a participant in social media? If so, on what mediums (Facebook, Twitter)?
  • What marketing and promotion strategies will assist you in reaching them?

2. Your Companies Number of Fans/Followers do NOT Matter in the Least. Your number of
engaged fans however does matter greatly. Imagine the following scenario.

Company A: 400,000 fans / 50% engagement

Company B: 800,000 fans / 25% engagement

If we were looking to initiate a direct mail campaign, Company B’s raw numbers will get the most eyeballs on your promotional materials. But in social media, Company A’s numbers are far more valuable than Company B’s. Both companies have the same number of engaged fans, but Company B’s number of unengaged, transitory fans triple that of their engaged fan base, while Company A’s numbers of engaged and unengaged fans remain equal.

When the inevitable public relations disaster happens, Company B will find itself with a wave of overwhelming negative feedback from their perceived fan base that will dwarf that from their engaged fans. This will lead to the perception, whether real or implied, that the more frequent negative opinions are in fact the prevailing opinions of Company B’s entire customer base. It will also frustrate their real fans as their support for Company B will be drowned out by the mob. Unengaged fans are no more fans of your company than the average long-ball hitter at the driving range golfer is a qualified professional golfer.

In the next post, we’ll continue with rules 3 and 4. If you have suggestions of things you’d like to see, or if you agree/disagree with this post, post your comments and let’s all discuss it. That, after all, is the ultimate power of this social media medium.

Filed Under: Social Media & Tech Tagged With: , , , , , ,
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