NOTE: This post was originally published on djgoosen.blogspot.com Wednesday, November 26, 2014.
With Black Friday and Cyber Monday fast approaching, this post is probably timely.
At B2C product launch (or any other time you can expect your business to be trending in the Twittersphere), tweets effectively become a sort of key performance indicator for customer engagement and UX, etc. In such cases, Tweetdeck is pretty great. We can just Chromecast it on a big screen in our war room (whether alongside other dashboards using something like “Revolver – Tabs” or standalone)– it’s an instant and ongoing conversation piece.
If we prefer, we can block images. Chrome Preferences… > Privacy | Content settings… > Images | Manage exceptions… > Hostname pattern: tweetdeck.twitter.com Behavior: Block. This lets everyone focus on the 140 characters or less themselves, whether good, bad or indifferent (and let’s be honest, there are no indifferent tweets). Of course, if someone tweets a screenshot of an error message, we can click it and not have Chrome block that, because of the more-specific pattern we opted for above. Blocking images provides a minimalist interface for the auto-refreshing cascades of our “qualitative KPI’s”.
In all seriousness, we use Tweetdeck as more of a real-time “heat check” than as an actual indicator of problems (hopefully we already spend enough time and dollars on monitoring/alerting/analytics to know what we need to know when we need to know it– leveraging Metrilyx/OpenTSDB and Splunk among others). But since customer experience is everything and social currency means so much in today’s ecomm environment, Tweetdeck gives us just a little bit more confidence that all is well with our stack on the days that really, really count.