At Firmhouse it sometimes gets hard to keep track of all schedules and weekly activities and what the progress is of our projects. To streamline communication of our activities we decided to have a planning meeting every Tuesday and post a message on Basecamp with our work to do for the next weekly meeting. This message gets posted into our company-wide Firmhouse project we have on Basecamp.
To automate this we introduced a script that posts a message every Tuesday. All project members can then comment on it by copy-pasting the template and filling it in.
Screenshot of Weekly Activity message
The script is written in Ruby and uses a modified basecamp.rb from 37Signals Developerland.
I am planning to write more of these lifehacking-like scripts for Basecamp and for this I’ve created a GitHub repository so you can use and modify them for your own use. You can find it (and more in the future) in the basecamp-scripts repository on GitHub. If you want to make changes or have other handy scripts. Please fork the repository and request for a merge!
If you liked this, please leave a comment or contact us in another way 
Bob Jansen
February 6, 2009 6:33
Business Cases
Today I experienced very good customer support by Soocial. Soocial provides a simple tool to sync your contact info between devices and web applications. We use it to sync our contacts from Highrise and Corporate Google Mail accounts to our Mac address books and iPhones. Currently it’s still in beta.
Syncing problems
A few weeks ago a syncing problem occured on my MacBook. iSync asked me to delete 167 e-mailadresses from my adressbook. A bit surprised I cancelled the question and disabled syncing directly. I popped into Twitter to see if other people had the same problem. What I received (after a few minutes) was a message from one of the technicians of Soocial. He asked me to send more info via e-mail so they could look into it. So I did, a quick response (two days later) arrived. It explained the problem and asked me to be patient as they’re working to resolve it.
Updates arrived
Today I received an automated e-mail from the Soocial team stating that the problems were solved. It explained me what to do to get everything in order again. I followed the instructions as described in the e-mail. After enabling syncing on my desktop I got the question to add 77 contacts, change information of 3 contacts and remove 361 contacts. Staring at my screen I didn’t know what to do. Popped into Twitter again to ask other users if they had the same problem. Again no other users responded but I received a reply from the official Soocial account. Telling me that it was normal behaviour, so it was ok.
I decided to follow their advice and accepted the sync. Now 39 of my 360 contacts were left (yes, that does feel pretty scary… even with a backup in place). I manually initiated another sync with Soocial and my old contacts where back (Yay!).
Happy user again
So this made me a happy Soocial user again. That’s not only due to the fact that problem is solved. The way in which I have been provided with support is very good. Especially when you consider the service is free and in beta.
What did we learn?
First of all, and very important when providing service in the social media environment, be personal. People don’t like to talk to brands. How do I talk to a logo of Coca Cola? I can’t! So the person talking in name of a brand shouldn’t be anonymous. That’s not rocket science, when calling with a support desk the other person on the other end of the line introduces him/herself. This shouldn’t be different when operating in social networks.
Secondly, but equally important, is monitoring social networks. I didn’t send them a reply or request for support. I just Tweeted:
‘Received good news of Soocial, activated my desktop sync (after force update in web app) My mac offers me to delete 371 contacts :-S’
I only mentioned their brand, they found out and send me a reply to help me. Imagine the goodwill you gain by that.
We did this for Tweetburner and are doing the same for Twumult. It feels like talking to your friend about a bad experience with a coca-cola vending machine. During the conversation your phone rings and a person of coca-cola is offering help.
Conclusion
Be personal and open. With Twitter, monitoring worth of mouth is easy. It will enable you to find actual information about your brand. It also reveals problems that people have. Responding is very important and it will gain goodwill for your service / brand. But keep in mind social networks are about people, so find the right people that are willing to use their identity while providing service in social networks.
