My boss doesn’t like mayonnaise in his sandwiches

Last March I read something on the BBC website about Twitter, it was written by Stephen Fry and he was clearly in love with micro-blogging. He suggested that tiny tweets could have a huge impact in the world. I was curious, so signed in to Twitter to have a a look. I followed Stephen Fry, but I didn’t know anyone else who used the site.

A few random ‘social media experts’ started following me, and I followed them back as that seemed to be the polite thing to do. I tentatively wrote a few tweets. I searched for the word “toddler” and decided to follow some mums. The first Twitter conversation I had was with @onlinemum who advised me on how to draw the curtains when my poorly child was asleep on my knee.

I was unhappy at work, and wondered if my company could use Twitter. I’d tried to get back into corporate blogging but that hadn’t worked, so I started to wonder if my company could use micro-blogging. I hoped they could, for the very selfish reason that I wanted a new challenge.

I’d only been tweeting a couple of weeks when I thought of tweeting for PokerSite.com. At the time I wasn’t even sure I liked Twitter. The social marketeers I was following didn’t say anything I wanted to hear, people did sometimes tweet trivial stuff that made me wonder why I was reading. But I was convinced that PokerSite.com could usefully use Twitter to give information to our players and show a friendly face to the world.

So proposals were made, meetings were held, hopes raised… and nothing happened. The blogging department decided they might do their own thing. I wasn’t needed. Fair enough.

I hadn’t quite given up on the company tweeting idea, I knew things could change fast and office politics were involved. It didn’t seem that Twitter fitted into anyone’s department, it wasn’t quite the blog, and it wasn’t quite marketing. I was based in support and had nothing to do with either department.

I kept tweeting and I was starting to see what Stephen Fry meant. Of course 140 character restrictions were useless if you wanted to say anything deep, but there were positive effects of these restrictions too. No one could say too much to bore or offend you. You could follow dozens of people and quickly see who you wanted to know better and who you wanted to drop. Tweets were fast, the news and zeitgeist in immediate form. Tweets were brilliantly searchable, I soon got to know the tweeters in my small town and to feel a sense of community. Twitter was a place to mingle, to find things out, to follow links to good information. I was excited by the potential for Twitter innovations, I followed @Mashable and loved links to sites that turn tweets into a picture, or looked at your follower list and cleverly suggested new people. It felt like Twitter was a new frontier for the geeks of the world. Stephen Fry, who introduced me to all of this, deserved his King Geek crown.

Facebook and Buzz have strengths, but I don’t think they touch simple Twitter for its diversity of uses. I love Twitter for unloading raw humanity to the internet like a zillion binary digits to code the Twitter program you need.

Want news and current affairs? Twitter will do that. Want to keep in touch with friends and link to blog posts? Fine. Want specialised knowledge about your hobby? Follow the right folks and you get that. Want a high score like a computer game? Work on your follower count. Want the satisfaction of online fame? Push your retweets and do networking.

My personal Twitter is a quirky cocktail of new friends, and poker, and social media and mums. Of course it’s not perfect, everyone ends up with buggy Twitter ‘software’. I sometimes try to patch my Twitter stream with Tweetdeck columns, or just live with the odd system crash of someone tweeting drunk and ruining my stream.

I’d all but given up on the idea of tweeting for my company, until someone used a rogue PokerSite.com account and tweeted in CAPITAL LETTERS. I don’t like CAPITAL LETTERS. I thought that made us look BAD. I didn’t have permission to try and make PokerSite.com look good, but I could at least try to stop us looking BAD on Twitter.

I sent a couple of emails, I asked around and chased things up, then someone mentioned that George in North American marketing had thought of using Twitter.

I emailed George. He emailed back, ‘Yeah, I thought of using Twitter. I used @PokerSite_com here’s the password if you want to do something with it.’

The @PokerSite _com name wasn’t perfect. What was the underscore about _? But I wasn’t in any position to complain. I logged in with George’s password and started tweeting for my company.

I still use George’s password today. I still don’t get what the password is about. We’ve recently lost that silly underscore to become simply @PokerSite.

I started writing company Twitter in July 2009 with tweets about the World Series of Poker, and I’ve written it every day since then, near enough. I probably ought to take a day off. I probably ought to get paid for this…

As it turns out that is going to happen. The story has more twists, and ups and downs, a few more scares, but the 140 character version is: We hired a new social media manager, I was offered a couple of hours a week helping him out. And I said, “No.”

I may come across as a scheming kind of person, I plotted to tweet for my company and pushily worked to get my way. I’m not usually a pushy person at all, but I’m quite proud that I said I want this and not that. And it worked!

It all seems to have come good. I seem to have wangled a social media job, and even better a part time social media job that fits in to my family life, and even better than that a part time social media job that fits into my family life and doesn’t lose connection with my work for the support department. I want to keep the support side of my work because I feel our support department is the very heart of PokerSite.com. My favourite tweets are the ones where I help a player with a support issue in only 140 characters.

Social media is the latest fashion, isn’t it? I’ve never done anything fashionable before.

I love my company, I love Twitter. PokerSite.com are a company with good people at the top and a strong belief that listening to our customers is the right way to run a business. All I want from ‘social media’ (do I have to call it that?) is to show our players that we are a company like this.

It scares me that there’ll soon be degrees in Social Media Marketing Studies telling their students, “You need to make your company look good.” Doesn’t this only work if you have a good company to start with? Will the students be tested on what they do when a company messes up? The ones who get A grades will be best at disguising the mess. This is when I start to worry and think I might not be cut out for this job.

But I work for a good company, I don’t expect the dilemma of bad stuff to hide. And if things go wrong I trust the people there to handle it well, and I will go with whatever they say.

When I started writing Twitter I’d search for mentions of PokerSite, and I’d see our players hating our site because they lost money with a good hand. Losing money with a good hand will happen in poker. It will happen a lot. Players look for someone to blame and instead of blaming poker maths they add it up and get, “That greedy rigged poker company hates me!”

I search Twitter now and I see comments like that, but they’re less, I’m not kidding – those kind of comments are less. I tweet and show @PokerSite is a decent company, because it is a decent company. I don’t need to make that up. I really do think the idea has filtered through to players on Twitter that we’re nice people and not some money grabbing machine.

In my support job I answer the ‘IT’S RIGGED’ emails from players and wish I was allowed to say that the guy who owns the company doesn’t like mayonnaise in his sandwiches. There’s this idea that the company is fixed by faceless monsters, if only we could say the mayonnaise line, wouldn’t that solve everything?

I don’t know what the social marketeers and social media gurus say about all this. I’ve read the social media marketing books and they do the wooly hippy thing, “Your customers will like you if you’re honest and talk to them. You could try asking them if they had a good day maybe? Oh yeah, and they might buy something one day.”

I sometimes forget the word marketing that’s connected to social media. I don’t even know if my new job title will include the word.

I do know that we’re working on a new social media project that will give our players a lot of fun. And I have another idea and I feel like shouting, “this is brilliant!” but instead I should probably write it down in bullet points in a brief email to my new manager. I have been warned about long emails. I let loose when I write longer than a tweet.

I haven’t even started my new job yet, so there’s still time to work out what Social Media Marketing means. In the meantime I hope our players will love our site more because we give them a great time, and excuse me while I go tweet that the boss doesn’t like mayonnaise.