AlertRank is no more...

The rather nice bolt-on for Google Alerts is sadly no more, I had a short email message in my inbox this morning stating:

"Our investors have decided that Alertrank has not generated enough of a following to justify maintaining it as a free site. As a result, we will be terminating the site on July 15th."

We've been using the service as an addition to the paid for monitoring that we use on a daily basis as it can sometimes pick things that get overlooked.

http://www.alertrank.com

It'll be a sadly missed service...

It's award time again...

Just a quick posting to say that the awards season is in full swing and that i'll be spending countless hours writing submissions and hopefully having my suit dry cleaned! Great visitor stats, increases in sign-ups and internal recognition is brilliant however, a nod from your peers at an awards ceremony can really help boost moral!

Good luck to anyone else entering, we might see you at the awards!

A surprise win for Twitter!

So, a quick update to the washing machine story... @gebu, who looks to be part of the french marketing arm of Hotpoint/Indesit, posted the instructions and manual on how to reset the machine within 3 hours, via Twitter! Brilliant!

The UK email service got back to me the following day... with the wrong information.

Customer service, I don't think so...

Time for me to have a mini moan about poor customer service, an annoyance for many people!

I had to move my Hotpoint washing machine this weekend and when I plugged it back in again the display language had changed to French! Although my knowledge of French washing terms will go through the roof i'd still like my language set back to English.

So, being keen I started to look online for the manual which I found pretty quickly, a 16 page PDF with no useful information in it at all.

So I checked online in the forums, plenty of people with the same issue but not a single response on how to fix the problem. Nothing from other users and more importantly, nothing from Hotpoint themselves...

Next, I thought i'd phone them (this is at 6pm on Saturday night) so I find the number for the information line but it's only open Mon - Fri 8.30am - 5.00pm!

My last resort... i'll email them. So, I sent off an email asking for help and I get the following reply: 

"We will respond to your enquiry as soon as possible. However please allow a maximum of 5 working days before pursuing a reply if you have not heard from us." 

Please don't chase us up for an answer until we've ignored you for at least five days?!

Now, I would class this as a pretty poor customer experience for me and i'm reasonably patient. What about the damage done to the Hotpoint brand by the unanswered questions on the forums, the lack of available documentation & FAQ's and the slow response to email enquiries? Poor online customer service is not really excusable in the times of automated monitoring systems and virtual advisors, especially from a company as large as Hotpoint.

Time to do things better Hotpoint... and will I get a reply to this posting?

Unified Communications?!

So, what exactly is Unified Communications (UC) and why are we interested in it at the University? Well, in seriously stripped down terms, it's a new phone system that runs over your network rather than a standard phone line. If you want the long explanation then Wikipedia is a good starting point:

http://uob.im/becxu4

This sounds like a great idea, you can have your number redirected to any device, PC softphone, Mobile, Desktop handset even a hotel phone if you're away for the night. The idea is that you have one number, assigned to you, no matter where you are in the world. It's a big concept to get your head around, you no longer need to be tied to a desk, you don't need to pay hotel charges to call out as the hotel phone essential becomes your phone. All charges are made back to your company and the whole system is seamless.

So, the big question is, how do you tell people about this?! For people who spend all day at their desks they won't notice the difference other than a shiny new handset. But, for people who are more mobile there are real advantages, the issue being though that there are more things to remember! If you're away from your desk or in a meeting what should your phone do? It can point to your mobile, it could go to your voicemail or it could go to someone else. But you need to tell it to do that and that needs to happen via a long push button system on the phone or via a web browser. So now we have a web browser controlling your phone and how do you explain that to someone not familiar with the concept?

As you can see, there are a lot of questions to be answered and explained in the easiest way possible... time to put our thinking caps on and pull in all of our resources, this could be a biggy!

bitly.pro here we come...

I finally received an email from bitly.pro (beta) this morning about our account being created, all very exciting stuff!

So, all social media links can now be shortened to uob.im, for example a link to our facebook page can be:

http://uob.im/ayDp2R

Genius stuff, nicely on brand but not too heavy handed and means we can get some feedback on link traffic from a central account. I just need to nominate a member of the team to handle the short url requests!

Ideally we would like an in-house URL shortening service but due to the timeframe for this to be implemented we have looked at an external alternative for the time being. We can always move over to the in-house option once it's up and running with an alternative domain name and then phase out the uob.im links. A bit of a pain but at least we can use the services now!

Yet another external product to enhance our offerings in Marketing, anyone else have 'timeframe' issues with development work?

Mobile devices... should we be worried?

I read an interesting posting by Mike Nolan at Edge Hill University about the use of mobile devices to view their website. So, in the interests of sharing information I thought i'd not a similar exercise for us! I've matched the dates used to run the report, 14th April – 13th June 2010 and included the resulting pie chart stats of unique visits below.

What you might notice is that we are also seeing a large number of visits from iPhone and iPod users to the website. In fact, the only really difference seems to be that we have more SymbianOS users, probably due to our selection of company mobile phone more than anything else.

So, should we be worried about the increase in mobile usage? Probably not just yet, our site is optimised to work rather well on Apple devices and by the time mobile browsing really takes off, things will have changed again! Just to put the sizes in context the total amount of visits for that period is 454,186...

One last thought though... poor LG...