Darryl King’s blog ireckon

Readers of this blog will know I like Twitter. And there are many others like me out there.

Yesterday I received my email advising me that because I don’t live in 1 of 3 countries, I would no longer receive the free SMS updates of the people I was following on Twitter.

Part of the attraction of Twitter is that you get to interact with it in a very cool way using your mobile, and out and about you get to interact with the people you follow. True mobile interactivity.

Due to their huge growth and of course the costs of this service they have turned it off.

While I won’t quit on Twitter just yet, I have started to look around at alternatives. Frankly I would probably pay for the SMS’s but that is not an option they have put in place for us Aussies. Well not that I have seen yet anyway. I don’t expect to get everything for free, like many users on the net, and am more than happy to pay for a service i get utility out of, but it seems their planning hasn’t factored me into their equation.

Facebook has an embedded widget for smart phones so that you get basically the same deal as being online, I get updates like messages on my phone and it costs me, not them - that’s smart thinking.

Maybe Twitter should have thought through all its options before it shut the gate on a community that has been extremely loyal through all its downtime and other issues.

I guess they feel the USA audience is enough to see them through the rough times, but that only creates more ill-will in the smaller countries that have high usage and uptake rates like Australia. I see a pal of mine in the UK bemoaning the same deal there, so that big audience isn’t going to be happy either.

Twitter, maybe this time the Whale of success might sink your boat!

So here is something which is hard for all service businesses. Losing a customer, or customers who want to cancel their subscriptions. Remember that customers who choose to go elsewhere, or just have no need for your service anymore are not necessarily lost forever.

We recently chose to use a Search Tool called Keyword Spy to do some strategic reviewing of a campaign. We subscribed for a couple of months, which was great, and got great value out of it.

But in good systematised cost control, my Chief of Search (yes that is his title), came and said we can cancel that sub for now because it isn’t needed at present. We regularly do this as we use possibly 50+ tools to keep up with a whole bunch of areas to do with Search Optimisation and Marketing, so hibernating the ones we aren’t using at present is part of the beauty of Software (or tools) as a Service (SaaS).

That is when the problem started.

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Recently I added the TXT ability to my twitter account, following the badgering and raving of a colleague who loves the way it works.

Being a gadget man myself, I just had to, particularly as we both discussed how the simplicity of the tool could be used in numerous business / personal angles, which I am sure many twitter devotees could attest to.

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further to my previous post, the virgin blue velocity global game is now back up and running!

What happens when the web goes horribly wrong.

Well a classic example is a marketing campaign run by Virginblue Velocity Rewards.

I received my points statement and a well hyped campaign to play an online game and go into win up to $70k in prizes.

So of course what did i do. I went on to play it. I love the web and how easy it is to enter competitions!

So i did.

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