Category Archives: Social Media

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Social Media

Butterscotch Sundae by the numbers

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I like the monthly “thanks for the links” post at 1+1+1=1. So I think I’m going to start doing it, too. The majority of my traffic comes from Facebook, which I guess means I actually know most of you in real life! Hugs all around!

November’s Top 5 Referrers Who Aren’t a Mega-Conglomeration

  1. We Are That Family, who hosts Works for Me Wednesday.
  2. I’m An Organizing Junkie, who hosts Menu Plan Monday.
  3. Because It Really Is Personal, After All, who doesn’t host anything (that I know of) but is still a swell place.
  4. Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers, who hosts a weekly homeschool-in-review thing.
  5. Daddy Scratches, which I believe is in the same BlogHer Headline Rotate-O-Matic thing as Butterscotch Sundae.

November’s Top 5 Searches

  1. bahn mi. The recipe I originally used is Bon Appetit’s Pork Meatball Banh Mi. I’ve since tweaked it to turn it into a hamburger, and I use less pepper than Bon Appetit calls for.
  2. butterscotch sundae (and various spellings thereof). You can find that recipe right here.
  3. how to quiet a cough. I wrote about that here. One of the suggestions sounds ridiculous, but it really does work.
  4. seventh grade. Have you seen any of those It Gets Better videos? Don’t be discouraged, because that’s true for just about everyone.
  5. autumn fires robert louis stevenson props. I’m sorry I don’t have anything helpful for you. Maybe you could rent a smoke machine? And carry a bouquet of flowers?

November’s Top Content

  1. “How My Daughter Learned to Read”
  2. “P90X Puts the Hurt on Perry Mason”
  3. “Adding It Up: The True Cost of P90X”
  4. “Blog Early, Blog Often: Finding Things to Write About”
  5. “This, That and Thanksgiving Dinner“
Social Media

Twitter makes customer service a little easier to stomach

I’m currently trying to get DSL service from AT&T, and it hasn’t been the World’s Smoothest Experience. The Works-for-Me Wednesdayactivation date was supposed to be Nov. 24th, but it still isn’t working. I called the tech support telephone number on Monday, and they told me they would put in a ticket. Which would take about 72 hours to process, so try calling back Thursday, thanks, have a swell day.

I’m not all that patient, so yesterday after I got a little twitchy about the whole thing, I decided to see if AT&T had a customer service presence on Twitter. And lo and behold: They do. I sent a message to @ATTCustomerCare, and a few hours later a poor AT&T guy came out in the deluge to check things out. It kind of felt like instant gratification, which isn’t something I experience very often in the world of customer service. The problem still isn’t fixed, but I just got a call from them telling me what they’re currently doing with the issue. It’s nice to be kept in the loop, at the very least.

So Twitter didn’t solve my problem altogether, but it did open another line of communication and get a few extra people involved in solving my service issue. AT&T isn’t the only company using Twitter to field service issues, either. The really savvy ones are keeping an eye out for mentions of their company, and they’re reaching out to people who’ve had a problem.

A few companies that are actively engaged on Twitter:

  • Delta Airlines, @DeltaAssist.
  • AllState Insurance, @Allstate.
  • DirecTV, @DirecTV.
  • Maytag, @MaytagCare.
  • Marriott Hotels, @MarriottIntl.

    • From here on out, I’ll check to see whether a company has a Twitter presence before I call the customer service phone line. The Twitter teams seem to be pretty small, which leads to a more personal experience. It might not mean your issue gets solved any faster, but at least it feels a little less corporate.

    Have you had a great customer service experience via social media? Let’s hear about it.

    National Blog Posting Month, Social Media

    Blog early, blog often: Finding things to write about

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    Works-for-Me WednesdayI’m participating in National Blog Posting Month, which means I have to come up with something to say here every day in November. I do post pretty frequently. Even so, it’s going to be a challenge to come up with something interesting to write every day. (Disclaimer: There’s no way I’ll come up with something interesting every day. But I will post something.)

    Writing regularly is a good idea even if you aren’t participating in NaBloPoMo. For me, it helps me feel like I’m engaged in a world outside of peanut butter and fingerpainting. It also keeps my brain a little bit sharper, I NaBloPoMo 2010think. (Except for when I’m taking cold medicine. Like, say, right now. Then I write things like “little bitter sharper,” which is sometimes accurate, too.)

    I find that it helps to follow a schedule with my blog posting, and there are a lot of meme-type themes that make that really easy. Here, for example, I regularly do Menu Plan Monday and Works for Me Wednesday. The menu-planning is something I do anyway, and it’s really easy to type that up and share it here (even if it isn’t maybe the most fascinating thing). The “works for me” posts tend to be a little more difficult, because they require more thought. But they have made me pay more attention to what I’m doing on a daily basis in an effort to try to notice things that might be making my life easier. (I feel like that didn’t make much sense. Alka-Seltzer cold, take me away!) I also try to do a little rundown on our homeschooling week on Saturdays. The Daily Meme has a bunch of other blogging memes listed.

    Beyond those regularly scheduled posts, I tend to just blather about things. (As I’m sure those of you who are regular readers have noticed.) I’m OK with that, but I might need more focus in November. So I’ve found a few writing-prompt sites that I plan to mine for NaBloPoMo. Maybe you’ll find them helpful, too.

  • Try Creative Writing focuses on prompts for creative writing, which absolutely is applicable to writing a blog. Some of it is clearly fiction-writing stuff, but there’s a lot of personal-experience fodder there, too.
  • The Write Prompts offers a new prompt every day, which would be a clear and simple way to do NaBloPoMo. They do the theme-days thing, too. Wednesdays are all about poetry, for example, and Tuesdays focus on discussing a provided image (much like what Casey and her friend are doing at YouSeeItDifferentlyThan.Me, but on a Internet-wide scale.)
  • Marelisa has put together a list of 119 journal prompts. I especially like the “100 Things I Love” section, in which she suggests subtopics of things like “10 People I Love” or “10 Restaurants I Love.” That would make for a nice series.

    • Do you have a go-to inspiration for writing?