PS – I didn’t notice the request for a name first on starting a chat window, hence I’m called ‘yo dude’!

Yet online advertising spend in the UK is on the up.

But, advertising itself looks to be pretty doomed these days. So doomed that it’s even starting to point fun at itself.

And over half of social media campaigns implemented by Fortune 1000 companies will fail.

Press releases are starting to feel even more out of place in today’s world of real people and resistance to corporate speak. So much so, the industry is beginning to parody itself and the language we use.

Yet the web is growing all the time and brands want to be a part of it. So what do they do?

1. Make sure that any social media/digital campaign it implements matches the needs of its community as well as itself.

2. Don’t fall into the trap of letting perceptions of short term ‘results’ override longer term, more meaningful ROI from a whole load of effort.

3. Keep focused on innovation and making its products/services better, in all respects (eg customer service).

Just a quick thought as all the dots begin to join up in my mind. Anything to add?

Jason Calcanis has dropped a clanger with his predictions that “50-80% of the venture-backed startups currently operating will shut down or go on life-support (i.e. 3-4 folks working on them) within the next 18 months” and to make matters worse – there’s a big ‘WTF’ resounding around the blogosphere as Silicon Alley Insider and others pulled their posts in which the contents of the original Calcanis email containing the predictions were published.

Perhaps everyone quickly agreed that predicting that 80% of the current start-up community will ‘shut down or go on life support’ was a bit much and not the most optimistic outlook for the industry, by the industry itself?

Here’s Loic wading in, on Seesmic, naturally. . .

Personally, I absolutely love the freedom and flexibility it gives you in your work. Since setting up Shed I’ve had the time to meet loads of really smart people, start working with a few of them and even cook up my own ideas for some web based things. As well as doing all that social media and digital stuff that I genuinely love.

Good luck Stephen and thanks for calling Shed disruptive.

PS It was Ged that called Shed a micro-agency and it’s kind of stuck in my mind.

Wow. This sent shivers up my spine. Live streams of Hurricane Gustav. You can hear news reports on the radio in the background and there’s the odd bit of commentary from time to time. As they say over on the Ustream blog – hope everyone is OK. The live web is most certainly upon us.

[via @noodlepie]

She responded in the comments direct and emailed me too and to make sure that everyone who received the original via RSS gets to read what she says I’ve decided to do a fresh post, as well as linking to this in the next comment on the original post. Also, from my point of view, it really has highlighted the need for PR, customer services and other areas of the business involved in a brand’s online presence to be fully integrated and in sync. To be honest I thought I might get an email back from Vodafone’s UK PR agency, not from a forum host at Vodafone itself.

Anyway, here’s how Gemma started her response – which immediately put me at ease and made me feel like I was dealing with a human being:

WOW, what an experience you had there! Firstly I’m glad it’s all sorted out and that you haven’t had to pay that humongous bill.

Secondly I would like to show that Vodafone are listening and address the points you’ve made:

And here’s what she said: (to make things easier to follow, I’ve copied across the original bits of feedback I gave at the end of my post, Gemma’s response underneath point by point and a thought from me under that)

1. Sort out your website so the charges are made explicitly clear for using mobile broadband abroad and what the process is for doing so.

I will defiantly be feeding this back to our online team. I agree with you it’s imperative that our website makes things clear and easy to understand. We are currently in the process of upgrading our online help centre so this is the perfect time for me to give this kind of feedback.

Cool – hopefully you’re asking a lot more people outside the business for feedback too.

2. Make your charges as low as possible. We know you can do it. So do it, before another network beats you to it.

We regularly review our price plans and our call charges. These have recently undergone a big improvement which I see you’re already taking advantage of, £15 for 3GB. I assume here you are talking about our roaming charges for data? We do offer these as low as we can, what we all have to bare in mind here is that Vodafone pay the network you connect to abroad for any usage whilst you are there, we then pass this charge on to our customer. Let’s also remember that we are a business and will add a profit onto these charges. That said I will again feedback you comments and who knows it may just make the difference.

Thanks and yep, understand you’re a business and need to make money – it just seems like there’s a real opportunity there for someone to make the first move and get things sorted. Individually networks in local countries do great deals for people on data – it just feels to me like there’s a real need for collaboration across the borders to get the price down low. 10 years down the line we’ll look back and think how silly all this roaming stuff is I think.

3. Improve your Mac dongle software. There are loads of us using Macs these days. Including a disproportionate number of bloggers and journalists.

We fully understand that a lot of our Mobile Broadband users are MAC users. We do everything we can to support you and if you pop onto our own eForum (http://forum.vodafone.co.uk) you will find additional support, (one of our eForum hosts is a MAC expert!) And yet again I will be feeding this back into the right area of the business.

Thanks for the pointer – I’ve taken a quick look and it looks like it could be helpful. Why didn’t I know about it? Might be an idea to stick a link to it here at the contact us page, as well as on the help page and other places on the site.

You don’t do everything you can though as a business – otherwise the Vodafone site would be fully accessible using Safari, the Mobile Connect software would have exactly the same features on both PC and Mac and things like the problems with Leopard and the application hanging (a problem experienced by myself right now – so this link has been really useful) would have been sorted out much more quickly.

4. Think about using Google maps to showcase network coverage in different countries more effectively. I knew exactly where the villa was I was staying, down to the postcode. Your maps don’t work on a Mac.

I like this idea, a change like this is well out of my scope but I will do some digging to see how feasible this would be and find the right person/people to pass this idea onto.

Great – I’m sure it would work a treat if done right.

5. Use email signatures! Include useful links – I might even think about buying something from you or using one of your services when abroad

Our email customer services team use great signatures, that explain who they are and where they are from (department wise) and they also provide great links to various things, like surveys on our service, latest products, our eForum etc. I think the problem you had was that you had been speaking to a telephone based customer service agent and they aren’t trained or developed in sending emails. They were in effect doing something outside their job role, they probably chose to be a telephone agent for the very reason that they struggle with spelling, typing etc. Regardless of this fact if an agent is offering to provide details of a call by email or letter it should be of a professional yet friendly style. If you would like us to address this with the individual agents then please contact us and we can do so. (To contact us please fill in the required section on our contact us form and in put the code FIT135 in the body of the email, this way it will come through to the eForum Team.)

Both the agents I dealt with were friendly and I think did their job well – up until the point of sending their emails. I didn’t want to email as I had multiple questions and wanted an immediate solution as I was traveling the next day. I’m sure had I done it on email, then I would have had a second set of questions based on the first response, which means more time to arrive at a solution and more typing from me. Plus the original email would have been fairly lengthy I imagine. I understand what you’re saying about people being good on the phone but not so good on email – but I still think that a basic level of quality and the inclusion of signatures etc needs to be implemented. I’m sure I’m not alone when I say I want to initiate a customer service experience with a phonecall and back it up with an email. Also – if I do email – I don’t want to use a browser based form. I’d like to use my own email app (mobile/desktop) just in case something crashes.

6. Be human. In both cases the call centre staff were really friendly, this didn’t come across in the emails. Also – apologise if you screw up. The fact I was told that it was a gesture of goodwill really wound me up. Let people in call centres use their names.

Our call centre agents are allowed to be themselves and it is fact encouraged. We want the contact you have with Vodafone to be a relaxed and friendly one. Again this is another issue I will report back on. I would like to say a big “SORRY” to you at this point for the screw up. I know it may not mean as much as it was prompted but I promise you I mean it. J

I appreciate that. And believe you. As I said, both agents were really friendly and human – the lady I spoke to about the billing error just chose the wrong phrase in the situation and I think this was prompted by a manager she spoke (at length) to. She then unfortunately further annoyed me with the email.

7. Train your staff how to use email and don’t be afraid to use it. Most people want confirmation that isn’t sat on your system and it represents a great chance for engagement with customers.

I agree with you here, I like to have confirmation by email. What I would say is that if you do prefer to have contacts in writing then you are probably best suited to our email contact centre. (Use link above for this.)

See above. I think if you asked, there’s a lot of people like me that like to speak to a person to get an issue resolved immediately, then want confirmation of information given on email as a back up.

8. Just like the banks do – don’t let huge abnormal bills run up on people’s accounts. Call them (or email them!) to ask them if everything is OK before those thousand odd pound bills happen and you create unhappy people like me.

We already have a system in place that prevents high bills from occurring. Clearly in your case this didn’t work. We have a department call “Credit Alerts”, their job it to monitor account usage compared to past usage and alert customers, by call, text or voicemail when the usage is unusual. If we don’t get confirmation from the customer a restriction is placed to prevent further charges being run up. At times a part payment towards the bill can be requested to reduce the charges back to a more reasonable rate. This service is supplementary and is not guaranteed to prevent high usage. Networks have a delay of up to 72 hours in the UK and as much as 3 months when outside of the UK, this means that we may not receive the call data in time to warn you.

Fair enough. It didn’t work this time. Next time it might I guess, if you fix the system and make it better.

9. Train more of your staff on mobile broadband/data. Or have a crack team that all calls get passed over to, if so make that team big enough for the number of people now using it.

This is already in place, our staff are undergoing further training on all of our data products and we will continually review and develop knowledge in this area. We also have what we call “product wizards” who know everything there is to know about a particular product/service and are on hand at all time to supports our agents.

Great. Everyone should be a product wizard really if they are in customer service for a product, right?

10. Listen, using social media and simple things like Google Alerts. We’ll see whether or not I’m right on that one. Over to you, Vodafone.

Nice suggestion and again something that is already in place, my team search through Google alerts, online forums and our own eForum to provide help and support through social media channels. I hope you agree with me when I say we’re doing a fantastic job.

That’s great that you do so – evidenced by your response I guess. I really appreciate the fact that you’ve responded to my post and as such feel a lot warmer to Vodafone now. You’ve put a human face on things and made me feel like my whinge was just a little bit worthwhile. Beyond Google alerts and monitoring forums – have you tried stuff like Twitter Search? (check out this global search of “hate vodafone“, this one one for all mentions of “vodafone” within 100 miles of London or this one for all negative mentions of “Vodafone” within 100 miles of London complete with a sad face!)

Also – if you can, try and respond to something as soon as you see it. We’re on Sunday now and I posted on Tuesday – that’s a lot of time in web time. To a highly cynical person like me – it makes me think either someone has emailed the link to you by stumbling across it, you’ve had to spend ages crafting a response and get it signed off and approved by a gazillion people (which strips the ‘human’ out of it a bit) or that you’re dealing with such a volume of complaints and other issues like this that you’ve only just got round to dealing with me. All bad things that are avoidable with a slightly quicker response.

Responding early and getting into the conversation as it is happening also means that you get to have your say while people are listening. I’ve posted since and the only way people would see your response if I hadn’t done this post is if they stumbled on the post via Google, if they subscribed to the feed for the comments on the original post or remembered to come back and check to see if Vodafone had responded.

All the above aside, I want to thank Gemma for spending the time to respond to me in such detail. I’m a decent human being (I hope) and am up for things being constructive – so I’m really glad that I heard back from Vodafone and that someone so ‘human’ got back to me. A great example of how to engage with people online I reckon.

Over the last few weeks I’ve been away a fair bit and because I run my own web-based business (Shed) I need to have fast, reliable broadband whilst I’m away. At the beginning of the year I went back to Vodafone (after leaving for T-Mobile a few years back after getting sick of the often unpredictable and always high monthly charges) and signed up for a 12-month mobile broadband contract at £15 a month for 3 gigabytes of data.

Before I left I checked in on the Vodafone website to see what the costs of using the dongle abroad (in Portugal as it happens) would be and much o my frustration, it wasn’t really clear. There was (and still is) also much talk of these costs coming right down for roaming data charges so I thought I’d call Vodafone customer services to make sure everything was 100% crystal clear and I was set up to pay the least amount possible.

After lots of discussion on the phone (there were lots of pauses and moments of uncertainty left, right and centre about mobile broadband in the UK, let alone using it abroad) I established that the best thing for me to do is as follows:

1. Change my contract temporarily for an extra £10
2. Pay £10 (£8.50 + VAT) for every 24 hours of use
3. Don’t go over 50MB in that 24 hour period

But – that came with the big caveat – you have to make sure that you are using the Vodafone Portugal network otherwise you will be charged at £10.28 per MB! Now I’m using the dongle on a Mac and somewhat predictably the software that comes with the dongle in a bit flakey – meaning that to access my modem I click on the app icon a few times, watch it bounce but not open, then open the network connection via network preferences. So, a question: “How am I supposed to know what network the dongle is connecting to?” Answer – “Take the sim out your dongle and put it in a mobile phone to see what network it connects to”. Response: “But, I am on T-Mobile and my phone is locked so I can’t check”. Answer ” Call T-Mobile and ask them for an unlock code”. Fail. In the end I used my wife’s phone (she’s on Vodafone) to check when I was out there.

Just to cover my back, because I’ve seen loads of issues with data before (including Ian’s CPW debacle), I asked for a confirmation email from Vodafone and this is what I received.

From: Customerservice@vodafone.co.uk
Date: 1 August 2008 10:45:14 BST
To: hopkins.jonathan@gmail.com
Subject: Vodafone Customer Services

on preferred network, vodafone potugal telecel the charges for using your mobile bb abroad is 9.99 p 24hrs as ive changed your pp to mobile bb roaming @ 30 p m. if you wander onto a different network the charges will be 10.28 p mb from vodafone

Yes, that’s official communication from Vodafone to its customers. No Dear Jonathan, Dear Sir, Dear customer. No email signature. No helpful links. No ‘have a great holiday’. Just the words. The absolute bare minimum number of keystrokes. And to make matters worse, despite trying to get off the line, I had to sit and listen to it being typed.

Anyway, appalling email aside, I get to Portugal, check that the network is Vodafone Portugal and fire up the dongle. Nothing. Absolutely nada. So, I call up Vodafone and because I recently changed contracts, a bar has been put back on my contract preventing me from using it abroad. Doh. I called to change contracts to a roaming one and they put a bar on. Ok, onwards and upwards, the bar gets removed and everything works fine. So, I use my mobile broadband and feel all good about mobile broadband again and the fact I can sit in the mountains of Portugal by the pool and do all my favourite web stuff.

Then, I get home. Everything is still working fine until yesterday my dongle stopped working. It wouldn’t connect to a carrier and I called Vodafone. After a big long winded explanation about the problem, I found out that my account was suspended and the person on the other end of the phone went a bit quiet. She said she needed to check something and need to put me on hold. So, there I am on hold for what seems like an eternity, I actually started to wonder if she’s hung up on me but then she came on the line and said very sheepishly “I’m sorry to have to tell you this but your current bill stands at £2579.77″. Yes, that’s right. I owed Vodafone over two and a half thousand pounds. It was surreal.

I then obviously outlined the whole situation and explained I’d done absolutely everything as instructed and she disappeared again. More hold music. More waiting. She then comes back on the line and tells me that ‘as a goodwill gesture’ Vodafone is crediting my account and reducing the bill down to £45.44. I then ask for an email to confirm everything discussed on the phone, partly for peace of mind and also to see if it’s from the same mickey mouse school of email that the last one came from.

Which it was:

From: Customerservice@vodafone.co.uk
Date: 25 August 2008 20:40:14 BST
To: hopkins.jonathan@gmail.com
Subject: Vodafone Customer Services

Dear MR Hopkins This is a confirmation email reg what we have disscuessd on your call earlyer to vodafone. there were charges accourde on ur broadband usage while you were roaming in Portugal. The charges where 257.977 but then that have been reversed and 2434.88 has been taken from that bill. the out standing balance now is only 45.44 and your price plan has been changed back to mobile broadband 3GB 12 month contact for 15. Thanx Vodafone

This time at least I got a ‘Dear MR Hopkins’, some more punctuation and a ‘Thanx Vodafone.’ But still no signature, horrendous typos and a glaring error on the first amount. Just for clarification, that figure was £2579.77.

THe reason Vodafone gave for the error was that the network in Portugal had charged them for the data and they had passed that charge directly onto me. Or something like that. Once I had confirmation that the charges were to be dropped, I wasn’t that interested. Vodafone screwed up, they didn’t even really apologise for doing so and to make matters worse, if my two emails are anything to go by they’re communicating with their customers really badly.

So, Vodafone, if you’re listening, here’s some feedback:

1. Sort out your website so the charges are made explicitly clear for using mobile broadband abroad and what the process is for doing so.
2. Make your charges as low as possible. We know you can do it. So do it, before another network beats you to it.
3. Improve your Mac dongle software. There are loads of us using Macs these days. Including a disproportionate number of bloggers and journalists.
4. Think about using Google maps to showcase network coverage in different countries more effectively. I knew exactly where the villa was I was staying, down to the postcode. Your maps don’t work on a Mac.
5. Use email signatures! Include useful links – I might even think about buying something from you or using one of your services when abroad
6. Be human. In both cases the call centre staff were really friendly, this didn’t come across in the emails. Also – apologise if you screw up. The fact I was told that it was a gesture of goodwill really wound me up. Let people in call centres use their names.
7. Train your staff how to use email and don’t be afraid to use it. Most people want confirmation that isn’t sat on your system and it represents a great chance for engagement with customers.
8. Just like the banks do – don’t let huge abnormal bills run up on people’s accounts. Call them (or email them!) to ask them if everything is OK before those thousand odd pound bills happen and you create unhappy people like me.
9. Train more of your staff on mobile broadband/data. Or have a crack team that all calls get passed over to, if so make that team big enough for the number of people now using it.
10. Listen, using social media and simple things like Google Alerts. We’ll see whether or not I’m right on that one. Over to you, Vodafone.

Nice one Mike. I encourage anyone in the business to read carefully as it applies not just to TCUK but any online media.

[Pic of Mike asking Ev from Twitter a question at Le Web 3 with Loic Le Meur on stage. Everyone looks a bit worried - can't remember what the question was but I'm sure there's a funny caption in here somewhere about revenue models or scale or something]

Wow. It’s all kicking off as the UK debates the success of (or lack of) UK blogs in making money and achieving high levels of traffic. Head on over to the original post on TechCrunch UK and get involved in some of those comments. Some very interesting stuff and personally, I think there’s another issue at stake here that this gives some really good insight into.

Scenario . . . You work in PR. You have a client that gets digital, wants to engage in social media and you’re all set to go, BUT – to your client only UK blogs, websites and other forms of social media matter. That’s because they have money that needs to be spent on the UK. The US team has money too, but they (and their US based agency) look after ‘the US’ and will handle the ‘big stuff’. You have to focus solely on UK bloggers and UK online media but the numbers don’t quite add up and there’s not really a decent selection of bloggers you’d recommend engaging with, or that you can find.

What’s the solution? Well, if you go with Ashley on the TechCrunch article then it looks quite complicated and will take a lot of time for the UK to catch up. A shorter term solution I think would be to make it easier to find decent UK blogs so that the space is much more clearly defined. For example BritBlog is closed now and you can’t search by country on blogcatalog. Yes, I know loads of blogs and bloggers through active participation in social media and occasionally someone will spend a bit of time pulling together lists of UK bloggers (often pulled from US/global lists) – but on the whole it feels a bit touch and go sometimes.

The need for absolute total integration of digital teams, budgets and social media activity is getting stronger all the time. There are no regional boundaries on the internet – it’s one big lovely thing and people don’t care which country their media comes from. They’re too busy getting everything for free and participating on the web.

So – the question is, do we try and work with clients to help unify their digital presence and belief in non-UK online media (if it’s important and valuable to them) or do we work together to try and make it easier for ourselves to establish a bigger, better UK blogging community and discover more niche, influential blogs? I think we should do both, but then it’s easy to say that and there’s loads of cool stuff happening already to help fuel the UK blogger community.

The next question is how and what we do in the meantime. Or you could just sack off ‘targeting’ altogether and focus on making your clients product or marketing so good that people will talk about it whatever country they’re in, without prompting.

The idea is to offer a platform for PRs and journalists. PRs seed stories and releases, and journalists can pick up the stories they like and use Pitchspace to organise the material for that story. The system also ranks PRs (and, I assume, journalists!) according to the relationships they build up with journalists, so the more they work together the more contact details they get, and so on.

PR is definitely broken as is, so it’s good to get the debate going as to what the solution is. So get involved if you care about such things, which I suspect a lot of people don’t. They’re just excited about the prospect of all this ubiquitous invisible connected technology stuff.

PS – I think the wrong URL is used in the podcast – it’s space not base, so don’t fall into the ‘rant about not having a live website when you’re featured on the Guardian and wasting an opportunity’ trap I fell into this morning. But then again a bit more info on the site would be nice, but they are probably still very much in protective phase I imagine.

One to keep an eye on.