I was in a Twitter conversation this morning with Luke Razzell about the iPhone and our different experiences when something goes wrong.
In Luke’s case, he had a problem with the antenna of his iPhone. He visited an Apple Genius Bar where his problem was identified and his phone replaced.
It literally took 5 mins on the spot—Genius checked it was a hardware issue (antenna), then swapped it.
While he waited, in other words.
Contrast that with my experience where I visited my nearest O2 store last Friday; they checked the phone and confirmed it would be replaced under Apple warranty… which will take a week to ten days.
Of course, Luke and I have different issues with our respective iPhones although the end result is the same: replace our phones for us.
So why couldn’t O2 have done the replacement there and then? Just wondering.
Hmm, let me just recap my recent experience with O2:
After the iPhone conked out on Boxing Day, I spent the better part of 100 minutes over the subsequent week in three different calls on hold to O2’s iPhone support number, two of them on a landline at national call rate, the other on a mobile phone in which I’d plugged the O2 SIM card (and which call was disconnected after 30 minutes).
In each call, I suffered the most awful hold music ever devised by man (or maybe it was an alien).
Yesterday, O2’s PR on Twitter mused that my unsuccess in connecting with anyone in support was probably due to the iPhone’s popularity over Christmas: “Just seen your blog, sorry about the problems - iPhone v popular over Christmas. Let me know how you get on w/your phone returning.”
A great experience at the O2 store in Reading last week was tempered somewhat by the fact that it’s going to be at least a week, and likely ten days, until a replacement iPhone arrives at the O2 store in Reading; they’ll call me and I then have to go into Reading to get it.
Today I learn that my friend Luke popped in to his nearest Apple Genius Bar and got his faulty iPhone swapped while he waited.
Content summary: Marking four years of FIR on Jan 3; upcoming FIR Interview with Jack O’Dwyer; Israel/Gaza/social media follow-up: Steve Lubetkin podcast interview with Israeli consul in USA; Michael Netzley reports from Singapore; the Media Monitoring Minute with CustomScoop; David Phillips reports from the shadow of Stonehenge; News That Fits: the 13 skills of the PR pro of the future, as phishing and hacking come to Twitter are they doing enough to help protect you?; Sallie Goetsch reports from the Podcast Asylum; listeners’ comments discussion; music from Maria Gaines; and more.
Messages from our sponsors: FIR is brought to you with Lawrence Ragan Communications, serving communicators worldwide for 35 years, www.ragan.com; Save time with the CustomScoop online clipping service: sign up for your free two-week trial, at www.customscoop.com/fir.
For Immediate Release: The Hobson & Holtz Report, for January 5, 2009: A 68-minute podcast recorded live from Wokingham, Berkshire, England, and Concord, California, USA.
Links for the blogs, individuals, companies and organizations we discussed or mentioned in the show are posted to the FIR Show Links pages at The New PR Wiki. You can contribute - see the show notes home page for info.
Share your comments or questions about this show, or suggestions for future shows, in the FIR FriendFeed Room. You can also email us at fircomments@gmail.com; call the Comment Line at +1 206 222 2803 (North America), +44 20 8133 9844 (Europe), or Skype: fircomments; comment at Twitter: twitter.com/FIR, or at Jaiku: fir.jaiku.com. You can email your comments, questions and suggestions as MP3 file attachments, if you wish (max. 3 minutes / 5Mb attachment, please!). We’ll be happy to see how we can include your audio contribution in a show.
As a way of bringing this micro-blogging / text chatting / social network / service to the attention of a wider UK public, both papers have done a good job for their combined circulation of nearly 3 million.
Unfortunately, both papers have done it in a way that demonstrates the journalists’ (and their editors’) utter lack of understanding of the social and business drivers underpinning much of the growth in use of Twitter by more and more people, focusing as they have on celebrities and the seeming triviality of their daily lives.
A great deal of what people twitter about is indeed the trivial and the mundane. Take a look at my own Twitter stream, for instance, and you’ll see that quite easily. Yet trivial-seeming chit-chat is very much at the heart of how we often relate to others and dismissing Twitter the way both of these mainstream media have done illustrates their own lack of imaginations.
Either that or it’s trivial content just to grab attention. It’s notable that both papers have a very similar focus, leading with Britney Spears’ use of Twitter (oh dear, poor soul).
While I wasn’t surprised to see the Mail’s story, the Telegraph’s did surprise me a bit given some of their recent and very good reporting about Twitter.
Four years ago today – on January 3, 2005 – we published the first episode of a new podcast called “For Immediate Release: The Hobson and Holtz Report.”
Describing ourselves as “Neville Hobson, ABC, and Shel Holtz, ABC, a pair of communication professionals who think they have something to say,” we set out to introduce something new into organizational communication by using a then-emerging tool such as podcasting to demonstrate how such a tool could work for communicators.
On January 1, we produced the 410th episode of the Hobson and Holtz Report.
Doing FIR also led us to get to know Yvonne De Vita and a deal with McGraw-Hill to write and produce How To Do Everything With Podcasting, a book that walks you, step by step, through the process of creating, broadcasting and promoting your own podcast, in the summer of 2007.
Most important, though, is the fact that doing FIR has given us a unique opportunity to create and help build a community of people around the world who take an interest in our brand of talk about that intersection of online communication, business and technology and what it might mean to communicators and their organizations.
So as we begin our fifth year of FIR, we’d like to say thank you to an awful lot of people – our listeners, fellow communicators, clients, journalists, other podcasters, other influencers… the list really is long – who have knowingly (and unknowingly) influenced and informed us and have been or have become members of this community.
We’d especially like to mention our correspondents, present and past, who form integral parts of FIR:
Dan York – reporting from New Hampshire on Thursdays on communication from the technologist’s point of view.
Michael Netzley – reporting from Singapore on Mondays on the communication scene across Asia.
Lee Hopkins – ‘our man in the Adelaide Hills,’ Lee was our first correspondent, reporting from Australia from 2005 until early 2008.
David Phillips – occasional reports from the shadows of Stonehenge in England.
Eric Schwartzman – occasional reporting from Los Angeles, the entertainment capital of the world.
They’ve done the same for the January 2009 list, this time giving me an exclusive look at the top 30 UK tech blogs from the Top 100 which will be published on Monday (Jan 5) when Wikio updates all their listings.
So here’s Wikio’s January 2009 list of the Top 30 Tech Blogs in the UK:
It’s been a major frustration since Boxing Day – no iPhone!
From one day to the next, my iPhone suddenly didn’t work. When I turned it on, all that happened is the screen you see in the image.
The most frustrating thing has been multiple (and all unsuccessful) attempts to speak to anyone at O2’s iPhone support department.
You phone the number, go through the recorded-voice menu choices… and you’re in a queue.
No matter which day it was, nor what time of day, I was in a queue. In total, I estimate I spent nearly 100 minutes on hold to O2 iPhone support during three call attempts, eventually giving up in each case.
And the hold music! Oh dear God, please don’t ever make me call O2 again if I have to endure that music! Here’s a two-minute sampler, a recording I made the last time I was on hold. Bet you can’t go beyond 15 seconds -
So a nice iPhone brick and I can’t get hold of anyone at O2 on a phone to talk about it. Today I decided to go and visit my nearest O2 store and see if anyone there could help.
Am I glad I did that! To my pleasant surprise, I encountered two O2 employees at the O2 Reading store – Sehana and Dan – who made me feel that a) they knew what they were doing and b) they actually did care about my problem and resolving it, even in a very busy store with long queues of customers.
Efficiently and purposefully, they investigated my problem and quickly concluded that a replacement under warranty was the thing to do.
No arguments, no quibbles, just enter some data, a couple of clicks, and get a printout confirming the exchange.
It’s not instant – it will be a week to ten days before I see the new iPhone – as it involves a warranty claim. That’s fine, I can live with that if it means the result is an iPhone without fault.
Plus I do have another mobile phone – my Nokia N95 8GB on a Vodafone contract – so I won’t be out of touch.
So while I think O2 really does need to have hard look at their structure for telephone customer support, and hoping I never ever have to call them again, as far as face-to-face in-store customer support is concerned, I cannot complain at all.
Content summary: Happy New Year and Speedy Alka-Seltzer; four years of FIR on Jan 3; vote for FIR at Podcast Alley; yesterday’s podcast panel on Talkshoe; the demise of Podango; Dan York reports from New Hampshire; the Media Monitoring Minute with CustomScoop; News That Fits: Demotix reinvents the newswire with UGC, Israel’s social media assault, 10 reasons why journalism schools should get rid of PR, Consumers Union to buy Gawker blog “Consumerist”; listeners’ comments discussion; music from Grace Potter and the Nocturnals; and more.
Messages from our sponsors: FIR is brought to you with Lawrence Ragan Communications, serving communicators worldwide for 35 years, www.ragan.com; Save time with the CustomScoop online clipping service: sign up for your free two-week trial, at www.customscoop.com/fir.
For Immediate Release: The Hobson & Holtz Report, for January 1, 2009: A 62-minute podcast recorded live from Concord, California, USA, and Wokingham, Berkshire, England.
Links for the blogs, individuals, companies and organizations we discussed or mentioned in the show are posted to the FIR Show Links pages at The New PR Wiki. You can contribute - see the show notes home page for info.
Share your comments or questions about this show, or suggestions for future shows, in the FIR FriendFeed Room. You can also email us at fircomments@gmail.com; call the Comment Line at +1 206 222 2803 (North America), +44 20 8133 9844 (Europe), or Skype: fircomments; comment at Twitter: twitter.com/FIR, or at Jaiku: fir.jaiku.com. You can email your comments, questions and suggestions as MP3 file attachments, if you wish (max. 3 minutes / 5Mb attachment, please!). We’ll be happy to see how we can include your audio contribution in a show.
Not a time for me to write a weighty post on the last day of 2008. No predictions, no recommendations – you have lots of choices for those things – just some reflections on people, places and events during this year that have influenced and informed my own thinking in many ways, not only to do with my strong interest in business, communication and technology.
What a disappointment – my iPhone apparently has a fault. When I switch it on, this is what I see on the screen and if I stroke the slider on the bottom of the display: After a little white, a dialogue pops up saying I need to restore settings from iTunes; and if I touch the [...]
What’s the iPhone virtual keypad like? is a question I’ve been asked a great deal over the past few weeks as I continue to get to know the iPhone 3G. So here in this video are some initial impressions. Impressions of iPhone #2 from Neville Hobson on Vimeo.
Just over week ago, I received an iPhone 3G to experiment with, get to know and figure out whether it would be a device that would make me want to forsake all others. This is part of Adrian Melrose’s ‘Applefy’ plan (time will tell how that works out), as well as to get a sense [...]
Pretty imaginative – 360-degree video on the move. First time I’ve seen that. Let the video load fully (to avoid buffering issues), then play. (Via Sam Michel)
Last week, I had the pleasure of using a T-Mobile G1, otherwise known as the Googlephone or Gphone. This is the device that runs Android, the new operating system and software platform developed by Google and others in the Open Handset Alliance, which was announced last November. Here are two videos of what I thought about the [...]
I was in a Twitter conversation this morning with Luke Razzell about the iPhone and our different experiences when something goes wrong.
Both the 
It’s been a major frustration since Boxing Day – no 
