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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 …

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.

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 …

Another launch day in the office, with our new iPhone app “Slurp” up on the App Store, just in time to use on your new iPhone 3GS! We’ve almost had around 100,000 people download our previous App for Cravendale, the Pocket Pirate, and are hoping this will follow in it’s success.

We’re pretty chuffed with this, it’s a lot of fun, and the perfect way to while away a bus journey. Try and top Edd’s high score of 14 if you can!

Oh and if you haven’t got an iPhone you can still play the game online at the Milk Matters site.

I find the RSS feed for The New York Times Technology section a daily source of joy. It’s always interesting, the writing is exemplary and the content is always relevent. And none more pertinent than in their recent piece on Tweeting Your Way to a Job, which details the ongoing trend for companies recruiting people into social media positions, and the tribulations that some people will go through to get them.

Outside Line were one of those companies. And when I came in for my first interview here almost 5 months ago I realised I was one of those people. So once a second interview was confirmed, and while waiting for a working brief to be sent through, I set up a secret Twitter stream where I could capture my work in progress for the presentation I was preparing. Thinking back to my Maths GCSE, and how “showing your working” was important as the answers themselves, my thinking was that Twitter was the perfect tool to capture a stream of consciousness.

I came, I saw, tweeted. And bagged a job.

And the learning? Twitter is a tool, not an idea. So if you’re using it to find the dream job, find some way of tailoring it towards to role itself – build a Flickr page of images you’ve found that might inspire the company, record a YouTube video of you using their products, set up a Tumblr of what you think will be relevent articles to your new position.

Be creative. Don’t just use technology for technology’s sake.

First, a recap: The Infinite Monkey Theorem is a famous thought experiment stating that “a monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter keyboard for an infinite amount of time will almost surely type a given text, such as the complete works of William Shakespeare”.

So why not put it into practice? Of course, we don’t have infinity, and typewriters have been replaced by keyboards, but we’ve still got monkeys! The Lucky Monkey is an insane site, which has a live feed of a room containing a monkey, a PC, and a connection to Twitter. You follow Jimmy (the monkey) on Twitter, and if the monkey types your username you win! ( don’t know what you win exactly, but it’s pretty neat nonetheless)

Now I’m going to spend the rest of the day thinking what thought expiriments we can make digital. Maybe we could stick a webcam in Schrödinger’s box?

We see it all the time, and now it heads to Twitter : “There’s Too Many People Here Syndrome”.

You know the place, that little bar that was once hip, and then everyone found out about it, it got busy, all the early people weren’t recognised as “being there first”, so they decided it wasn’t very good anymore. And it happens all the time on the net – Usenet groups, IRC channels, forums. And now Social Media Snobs are leaving Twitter in numbers as they believe popularity and credibility are mutually exclusive, and even if they can prove they were “here before you” it doesn’t change the fact that something that was once “their special thing” is now part of the mainstream.

But allow me to offer a counterpoint: what if it’s not snobbery? There have been significant studies in the area – the Dunbar Number, made popular by Gladwell’s Tipping Point, states than around 150 contacts is as many stable personal relationships our brains can manage. So it could be argued that as the number of people visiting somewhere increases, the chance for our brains to process all these people is reduced.

I’d love to know your thoughts – snobbery or science? And could this diagram be bettered in anyway?

(With credit to Diesel Sweeties for the original “Music snobs” idea, go buy his stuff!)

Click for HD

Our South African motion wünderkid Kris Cook has knocked up “A Tale of Two Spreads”, an incredible piece of motion work for our recently launched Friends of Butter site. Friends of Butter aims dispel “unhealthy” myths around eating butter, with testimonials from top chefs extolling the virtues of using real butter rather than margarine. We’re hoping that this video does for the butter vs margarine debate what the Crisis of Credit animation did for the financial apocalypse.

Obviously, this is best enjoyed on our Vimeo page in it’s full HD glory.