Hootsuite, mistakes and crisis communications

The wrong way to communicate during a crisis is to not communicate at all.

Hootsuite demonstrated this last month. I think it’s an opportunity for all of us professional communicators to learn how to communicate during a crisis — especially when it’s a crisis that most observers will blame on you.

Hootsuite is a service that allows users to manage their Twitter feeds. One of its best features — the reason that I subscribe to it — is the ability to create a spreadsheet to schedule a day (or more) of Tweets in advance. Into the spreadsheet, you put the date and time for the tweet, the message, and any links. Then you save the spreadsheet in .csv format and upload it. Hootsuite will send up to 350 tweets at the time you specify.

I’ve been using it for more than a year. Then, around about mid-November this year, I started to get error messages when I tried updating a day’s worth of tweets. 

Any computer user with my level of training and knowledge of computers (very little) is used to error messages. Hootsuite gives you an error message if you try to schedule the same message twice in one day, or if any message is more than 140 characters long (Twitter’s maximum). 

In mid-November, however, when I tried to upload a file of daily tweets, I got an error message that had no specific errors. Just the message “No further tweets will be uploaded until the errors are resolved.”

I thought, naturally, that I had done something wrong. I checked my file to make sure no message, including links, was more than 135 characters long (a time-consuming process). I made sure that there were no repeated messages. 

Everything seemed to check out. But Hootsuite would still not accept the file.

I tried uploading a smaller file, breaking a day into two, then three, then four smaller files. Eventually, the smaller files would upload, but not consistently. There seemed to be no logic, no consistency to the way that Hootsuite would upload a spreadsheet. 

Finally, I Googled the problem. I found a forum for Hootsuite customer questions, and it seemed that a lot of people were having the same problem I was: they could not upload spreadsheets.

Hootsuite technicians, to their credit, were monitoring the blog, and left messages along the lines of “We are aware of the problem and are working on a solution.”

This continued for over a week — to no one’s satisfaction.

Crisis communications

This is an excellent example of crisis communications — how an organization communicates with its publics when something is going wrong. It can be very challenging in this kind of situation, because users naturally blame the company, the originators of the technology, for causing the problem in the first place.

There were several messages on the forum about how people were going to take their business to a Hootsuite competitor. “We’re paying for this service!” is how more than one customer put it.

Some of Hootsuite’s competitors started to take advantage of the problem by sending out the message that their services were working fine at the time.

The problem was that, while Hootsuite’s techs were working flat out on resolving the problem, they were not communicating that. Users had no idea what the problem was, how long it would be until it was resolved, or whether there were any workarounds. Doubtlessly, there were alternatives, and some customers probably changed horses. 

Eventually, around November 21 or so, they seem to have solved the problem. But they didn’t explain what the problem was, what had caused it or what customers should do the next time something like it happens.

Obviously, this is not good for credibility. Most people who use computers and web services expect there to be technical problems from time to time. We’re all familiar with that little program built into the deepest, most basic level of every operating system that causes random errors to pop up. We get that that’s how programmers ensure they’ll all have jobs, even after they build the perfect computer.

But we still want to know that the company we pay for a service we come to rely on is working on, and making progress with problems we encounter.

After the problem was fixed, Hootsuite announced they had solved the issue. I tried uploading a file of tweets, and it worked, no problem. I then sent Hootsuite’s customer service department an email with some questions about the experience. I explained that, as a journalist and blogger, I wanted to do a story about this issue, and gave them an opportunity to present their side.

I got no answer. Big mistake on Hootsuite’s part.

What Hootsuite should have done

• Admit publicly and prominently that they were aware of the problem — on their Home page, and with an email to all customers who use the bulk uploader service
• Communicate their plans — how long did they anticipate they would take to fix the problem?
• Suggest work-arounds  
• Communicate their progress 
• what kind of resources (meaning skilled people and their tools) they had dedicated to the problem
• when they had identified the problem
• how long they anticipated taking to solve it.

I know that it can be scary for any organization to admit that it has a problem, but it’s better than the alternative: to let your market know that you can’t handle problems. Even if they took longer to fix the problem than they indicated, they could have announced that the solution was taking longer than they anticipated, and set another honest solution horizon.

The alternative, not communicating, leaves the impression of an uncaring corporation. It leaves users wondering if anything at all is happening behind the scenes, which in turn prompts them to turn to the competition.

Communicating during a crisis is one of the biggest challenges for any communications professional. However, the best strategy is the same as in most situations: keep communicating, be honest and tell your audience as much as you can.

More communication = more information, and today, people LIKE information.

What do you gain by not admitting your shortcomings? In the age of instant, constant and ubiquitous communication, you don’t hide anything. 

An organization is much further ahead by keeping the connections with its customers alive and open. Just as in a personal relationship, being honest about your problems  builds trust, which helps cement long-term relationships with customers.

Progress report: The state of the blog — and a thank-you

I’m excited: pageviews on this blog broke through the 200,000 count a couple of days ago.

In other words, people from literally around the world have clicked their way to at least open their browsers on Written Words over 200,000 times — most of them in the past three years.

I like to think that viewers come back frequently — and with under 40 email subscribers who have signed onto the feedburner, and 247 Google “members,” I think I’m safe to say that the same people come back repeatedly.

A slow launch

This picture of the all-time history of pageviews looks like a cross-section of Alberta, looking south: the prairies almost perfectly flat until BOOM! a steep rise that really look like mountains.

I launched this blog in 2006, but I did everything wrong for the first four years: rare updates, mostly text, unsupported by any other promotion other than a few emails.

Then I got serious. When I was getting close to publishing my first novel, The Bones of the Earth, I started reading about publishing and promoting your own work. “Build a platform,” was a common theme from many advisors. A platform, went the common wisdom, comprised a website, a blog, a Facebook page and a Twitter feed.

I went to work and started writing blog posts more frequently in April 2011 — eight posts that month, but then fell back to just three in May and only one in all of June.

Getting serious

By August 2011, though, after a vacation, I really got serious and started posting two or three times a week. And I’ve managed to keep that up, too.

At about that time (as far as my Swiss-cheese-like memory can recall), I started using Twitter, and (as many of you know), most of my tweets link back to this blog. That’s probably how you got here in the first place.

That was when the visits really took off. My Twitter feed grew pretty quickly, to over 2,000 followers in the first year. It’s leveled off since then, but it’s pretty clear that tweets bring viewers to the blog.

I have done a few experiments. I use Hootsuite to schedule my tweets, usually a day or so in advance. (I also interactively add other tweets, and retweet stuff when I can.) If I reduce the frequency of tweets, my daily pageviews decrease, as well. I hope that I am not wearing out my Twitter welcome (Twelcome?) with such frequent use of the medium, but as long as my pageviews keep rising, I’ll assume I haven’t.

The next plateau?

These days, the average number of pageviews is around 400 a day; a marketing expert I know told me that he’s read reports that that is a very healthy number for a blog. That adds up to over 12,000 per month. While the two measures are not comparable, 12,000 readers of a trade magazine in Canada was once considered strong.

If this keeps up, that total pageview number will reach 300,000 in less than a year.

Who is to blame for this? You are, dear readers — you who keep coming back to see what’s on the blog.

Thank you.

Writing and tweeting tips: Hootsuite troubles



Source: Belch.com

 You’d think I’d have learned by now: whenever you try something new, test it to make sure it works. But though I know that rule, I ignore it. I have all sorts of good reasons: lack of time, lack of attention ... and every time, it comes back to bite me in the ass.

The lesson: when you start using a new system, such as one that will automate Tweeting for you, test it before you trust it completely.

I’ve been using Hootsuite for a couple of weeks now to schedule most of my daily tweets, and while it’s pretty easy to use, it was botching the links. For I don’t know how long now, nearly every link I had tweeted through Hootsuite (hooted?) did not work.

But I didn’t check, so I only found out when Twitter followers started notifying me that “the link in your Tweet is broken.”

The first time I saw that, I thought that I had inadvertently deleted one character from the abbreviated link address. The second time, I thought maybe that follower had some kind of browser incompatibility. But when I started getting three or four of these each day, I knew something was wrong. (They don’t call me Sherlock for nothing ... or actually, ever.)

I went to the Scheduled Tweets panel in my Hootsuite screen, and clicked on every URL. None of them worked. Each time, I got an error message that the URL did not exist.

Then I looked at the stream of sent Tweets in Twitter, itself. And I saw something strange. Where I had used Hootsuite to shorten the URL, which results in a link that starts with “ow.ly/”, Twitter showed a Twitter abbreviation that starts with t.co/

Getting to the bottom of it

I’ve been using SocialOomph to schedule Tweets for a few months, now. The system works well: it will shorten URLs like Bit.Ly does, and allow you to write and store tweets in advance. Tweets can include both #hashtags and @Twitter handles.

I’ve found SocialOomph to be reliable and robust: I have not yet found and instance where a tweet I scheduled did not go out, unless it violated some Twitter rule.

But the free version is limited. You cannot send out too many automated tweets with a Twitter handle (@Name) in a short time span. With some experimentation, I found that the time span is about an hour, so I restrict myself to scheduling one Tweet with an @ handle per hour. Also, you cannot repeat the same URL more than once per day. However, I found that I could send to the same URL within 16 hours.

The free trial version does not support creating a spreadsheet to schedule tweets, and I found I was spending a lot of time each day scheduling tweets one at a time. On the other hand, the “Professional” version, which does support mass uploading, costs $35 per month. That’s a little rich for me.

I investigated a couple of other services. Gremln is cute, does the same things as the other services, and it’s relatively cheap at $6 per month for a basic account that allows bulk updates. Hootsuite charges a little more: $9.99 per month, but it takes fewer clicks of the mouse to accomplish the same things. Some of my Twitter friends had run into glitches using Gremln. So, Hootsuite it was.

Solving the problem

It seems that Hootsuite developers have the same mentality as Microsoft Office programmers: they like to help you without letting you know they’re helping you, like the way that Word used to make the entire document bold when you bolded one word.

Hootsuite’s bulk tweet scheduling instructions tell you to create a spreadsheet with all your tweets in advance. You create a .csv (comma-separated values) format document. Each line should have the time, the tweet, and an optional URL link. Each of these fields, say the instructions, must begin and end with double quotation marks.

I use a spreadsheet program (either Microsoft Excel or OpenOffice) to create a .csv file. The program creates a raw text file, putting commas where the cells end. But it seems that the program also adds the quotation marks.

After I create the file, three processes affect it beyond my control: first, the spreadsheet program saves my content and formats it the way it sees fit; then Hootsuite uploads it, analyzes it to ensure it meets its standards, and then sends it to Twitter.

There are at least two conversions happening in this process: spreadsheet to .csv, and Hootsuite to Twitter. There may be more within Hootsuite and Twitter, too. Somewhere, the URLs I abbreviated through Hootsuite software get changed again.

The solution

I removed the quotation marks that I typed in around the Tweet text and the URLs. Then I tested that, scheduling four tweets just a little in advance (Hootsuite requires at least ten minutes notice). That worked — the shortened links took me where I wanted to go.

So the second lesson here is: when you’re creating a .csv file with a spreadsheet program to schedule your tweets for Hootsuite, do not add double quotation marks before and after the Tweet content or the links. If you want a quotation mark within the tweet, use single quotes.

I did leave the double quotation marks around the time, though, and that seems to be working.

Source: Creative Commons

The real lesson: whenever you decide to automate any process, test it first.