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… it’s just not evenly distributed. If this isn’t the coolest thing you see today, I’ll eat my hat.

Late news that you may have come across already – earlier this month, after a pitch process filled with many a late night, we were informed that we’d won the digital account for the UK’s biggest dairy brand Lurpak.

We’re well chuffed with this, and can’t wait to get cracking, bringing Lurpak into the social media sphere and coming up with some killer digital ideas for the kings of butter.

The rumours going round are that it was the “Your Team” slide, which featured us all cooking breakfast on a Saturday morning, that pushed us over the edge. Although this may be someone just spreading it a bit thick …

Outside Line are looking for a front-end developer to join our team in Exmouth Market, London. We need someone who is obsessed with producing clean, accessible and semantic mark-up and loves nothing more than pushing browsers to their limits with CSS and Javascript. Bonus points will be awarded, (in order of importance) for knowledge of PHP, MySQL, CodeIgniter and MVC and putting the milk in before the teabag/water. We ideally want someone with agency experience looking to step up to a bigger league and make their mark.

You will be working with extremely talented designers and developers at a top UK agency on projects for clients such as Jenson Button, Eminem, Cravendale, The Brits, Virgin Galactic, Diesel, Lurpak and Paul McCartney. You will be joining a tight knit studio that love producing exciting content for the web (with a bit of table football and Guitar Hero on the side).

Salary will be dependent on experience and is negotiable. No remote workers, people who can’t work in the UK or agencies.

If you are interested, email your CV / portfolio to frontendjuly09@outsideline.com

Everyone has their own customer service horror story, but few of them have a happy ending. And even fewer of those are when you’re dealing with a huge conglomerate.

But even the big boys are realising that utilising social media can completely change how their company is perceived.

If you’d have recently asked me my thoughts on BT customer service, it would have been a expletive-laden reply you wouldn’t want your kids to hear. I was having a nightmare moving house, and after promising me a “no wait switch on” with my broadband, BT then informed me it would take 10 days to get it turned on. After all that, they still managed to disconnect me 4 weeks later, after the previous occupants didn’t pay their final bill.

Cue multiple 2 hour phone calls, being passed from department to department, speaking to innumerable women named “Judith”, none of whom cared about my problem due to the  fact that it didn’t perfectly match an entry in their scripts. One department blaming another, put through to someone new and having to explain everything again, or (my bugbear) having to call back on another number, as they can’t put your call through to the right person.

So I did what any enraged hyper-connected geek would do. I got on Twitter, and had a bitch about it.

I was expecting a few @replies from followers who had similar nightmare stories. But about 10 minutes later, someone called Stephanie from @btcare Tweeted back with a simple “any way we can help?” – opening the lines of communication between customer and consumer immediately. For the sake of shortening the story, all I need to say is that within 24 hours the problem was solved, and I was kept informed every step of the way.

There are hundreds of reasons why I think this approach works better than the current call centre cancer running through the customer service industry, here’s just a few:

Multiple concurrent tickets If you check the @btcare page now, you’ll see that they have one person dealing with many problems at once. As support can be provided in an asynchronous manner, there’s no need to wait on the line while a user checks their computer , or while BT look up something on their system. So time is used effeciently by both parties, meaning more work can be done with less people.

One problem, one person Anyone who has had a customer service nightmare can relate to this – there’s nothing worse than following a problem through, and having to reiterate your problem every time you make a phonecall. With @btcare, there are two people working in shifts, so if you maintain contact over one time period, they’re likely to be fully aware of all the details of your problem.

Traceable, by both parties I got into a shouting match with a TV manufacturer once, who charged me £75 for a maintenance callout, and when I called they said “we informed you about this during our last call”. They didn’t, but there was no way I could prove it. Now, I can track the conversation on Twitter, and when it went over into my email all was saved for future prosperity.

More communication channels available I think this is my favourite. The initial outreach was done via Twitter, and private details along with error messages were sent on an email follow-up. After 24 hours, Stephanie called to see if everything was working OK. Each time, the medium perfectly matches the message, and all options are available for @btcare at all times. If I ring a call centre, we’re going to be on the phone and that’s it – limited by the constraints of the telephone.

Naysayers might think that this Twitter approach can only work one person at a time, but BT, like many companies venturing into social media, are aware of the power of word of mouth, and that active internet users are vocal both in their ferocity and their praise. Could we see the day that companies without active customer support teams working across social media are seen as those in the 90s who stuck with the Yellow Pages instead of getting a website?

If you’ve read this far (fingers crossed) I’d like to think that your opinion of BT customer service is less a faceless name in a huge call centre in India, and more Cameron and Stephanie in a little Irish town called Enniskillen. And I can only hope that this post gets filled with Google Juice, and manages to make it up those rankings so that when people do search for “BT Customer Service” they know that BT trying to fix something that is so obviously broken.

Last month, South Australian tourism promoters launched Roo Tube, a seemingly good idea to stream live bouncy kangaroos to the UK. However, when British users went to check out this new footage – they drastically tried to turn up their screen contrast as it just showed darkness. 

The Aussies had forgotten that they were 8 hours ahead of the UK – so during the day, when most want to view this webcam, it’s their night time!

However, the Aussie website has given us some assuring advice, “Be patient and you’ll see their eyes jumping around”.

How exciting is that?! Not very. Well, it could be – if you’re a Marsupial Lion.

If you’re a Twitter user, you can’t help but have noticed the term #moonfruit popping up in your stream of late. A bit of digging around will lead you their site (not linked on purpose), where they are offering a free MacBook Pro everyday to a random user who includes the #moonfruit hashtag in one of their Tweets.

This is following on from another company, who did a similar thing with #squarespace and iPhones last month.

Hmmm, over we head to check out Wikipedia’s definition of spam:

“Spam is the abuse of electronic messaging systems … to send unsolicited bulk messages indiscriminately”

So the the #moonfruit promotion is spam, pure and simple, right? Well, unless you’re Adam Ostrow, Editor in Chief at Mashable. Apparently polluting your followers’ stream with bullshit is actually “Twitter promotion done right” and to hell with the fact that it will soon render Twitter’s trending topics functionality a spam blacklist. It’s disheartening to see that no matter what the medium, there will always be bad marketers around to apply scummy techniques.

Here’s an idea for “Twitter promotion done right” – make a great product, and release it with a clever launch. If it’s smart, everyone talk about it. Get to the top of the trending topics legitimately, not by dangling carrots in front of keyboard-equiped imbeciles who don’t know better.

As The Guardian’s @katebevan put it this afternoon “(I’m) fed up with moonfruit spam and considering unfollowing anyone who adds to it”.

Count me in on that one too Kate.

Please list any and all, current personal or business websites, web pages or memberships on any Internet-based chat rooms, social clubs or forums, to include, but not limited to: Facebook, Google, Yahoo, YouTube.com, MySpace, etc.”

Fancy a job with the City of Bozeman (pop. 27,509)? Well get ready to divulge your whole social footprint to your future employer. The above line is taken from their application form, with a space to fill in the URLs of all your online profile locations.

Is this something that we’re going to be seeing more of further down the line? We’ve seen people getting sacked for Facebook transgressions, but surely this is a step too far? I’m all for helping employers to see the many facets of your skillset and interests via what you share with them on your CV, but that should be a decision made by the candidate, not the employer. It’s called a personal life for a reason, and the idea that you could be denied a job due to something you wrote in a forum in 1999* is absurd.

However, remember the golden rule of social networks – if you’re not happy with someone, one day, finding something you’ve done or said, then don’t put it out there.

* I’m just glad that my forum posts from that era were all done under an alias …