What kinds of resources are offered and consumed, depends to a great extent on the active size and activity of the community. Highly active groups, with lots of new users might offer an Internet Relay Chat channel, where experts and would-be experts can give immediate feedback on questions. Less active and smaller communities may have simple threaded discussion forums or congregate around comments to articles on a blog.

Many of these special interest groups maintain a Wiki – a self-service website, where Joe Random can create pages. The most famous example of a Wiki, and the progress that has been made in understanding how to manage the information that is supplied, especially when there are commercial interests in play, is Wikipedia.

These forums are all constructed around a shared interest in an area, and in problems that can be publicly expressed. You won’t find many public forums that are devoted to helping people to login to their banking facilities, resolve specific instances of credit card payment problems, or diagnose authentication problems for their online share trading account.

There’s a separation line between customer service – where you are the only person affected by a specific decision, and a general answer is unhelpful – and technical support – where if your problem is resolved, it may help others.

So, if uSwitch answers a specific question in Twitter about a person looking for a resource, or gets feedback about site features, that’s a great use of social media. It provides information that other users might find helpful.

On the other hand, Google doesn’t grasp this difference between public conversations that help other users and conversations that should only be held in private between the customer and the service provider. Unless you are a large customer, you’ll access Google customer services through the public forums. But answering a question about why a specific persons’ credit card hasn’t been processed for a specific transaction, or when a specific persons’ adverts will be reviewed, has no value to the other users in the forum. The answers to those questions provide no illumination or assistance to anyone else. But unless individual users pose individual questions, they don’t get attention – so the forum can degenerate into highly repetitive content, rather than highly informative content.

Summary

Although there is an overlap between customer service and support services, there are components of the provider-client relationship that should be kept private, and if published do nothing to improve the relationship with third parties. On the other hand, a lot of questions asked of customer service staff have generic answers – where a specific response to a questioner may be to direct them to an FAQ on the subject, and that would be of value to third parties with the same type of problem.

Distinguishing which type of interaction model should be used, and for which types of interaction with a client, is important. Selecting the wrong interaction model can create problems.

Selecting the right interaction model, can boost client confidence and interest. Showing that you’re on the ball, and providing specific answers to useful questions can demonstrate your company’s expertise and customer service values, better than any corporate mission statement.

This short article is part of a series of quick meditations on internet interaction, the uses and abuses of social media and their impact on bringing visitors to a business, and improving conversion. The previous article in this series was about reflecting how your business works, as perceived by the user.

There are various ways for users to ask Google Customer Service for assistance. By and large, if those systems fail, then users are given a message to ask on the AdWords Help Forum.

I count how many questions are really Google Internal Status questions. Questions that should have been directed to customer service, but have wound up in a user to user forum, where the users do not have access to account specific information for another advertiser. I then express that question count as a percentage.

A Weather Report of 40% means that forty in one hundred of the most recent threads are judged, by me, as requiring a piece of information that only Google can answer. A question that I can’t touch other than to give reassuring messages.

At this point, you may be wondering why I bother. I like solving problems. AdWords is my crossword puzzle. I used to be a lecturer – a University educator and researcher, roughly equivalent to a US Professor – and I still like mentoring or tutoring. So if people ask questions I can answer, and especially if I can deliver a short answer to provoke some thinking, I’m a happier bunny. I don’t get (many) leads this way. Given that I’ve posted several thousand responses, the handful of mostly low value and short period clients isn’t a financial justification. OTOH, I think I can probably troubleshoot an AdWords account in less time than almost anyone on the planet… That’s why I do it. The fun of looking at 200 newly posted questions and going – “yeah”, “yup”, “easy”, “know it”, “yeah”… And I’m genuinely delighted when someone asks something that I don’t instantly have an answer for.

The “Weather Report” is really a count of the questions that are uninteresting for me; questions where the answer is obvious if you work for Google and have access to the AdWords management tools, and not obvious if you don’t :)

If you want to see my assessment of how well Google is directing users to appropriate resources, follow me on Twitter as JezChatfield.

I’m used to the phenomenon of users ReTweeting, in which the original author is given attribution. Are there really so many Twitter users out there, with nothing original to say for themselves, and who don’t have the generosity of spirit to apportion authorship, or is there a sponsored campaign going on to post substantially identical messages *except for* the shortened URL?

And there’s more…

As I say, I’m a relatively new Twitter user, so it is possible that this morally dubious behaviour is common. I hope that there some kind of community sanction that can be taken against users who ReTweet without attribution – but I don’t see anything obvious short of claiming them as spammers.

As Twitter increases in importance, this bad practice of plagiarism seems likely to increase, and starts to decrease the social networking value of Twitter.

It may also point to how corporations are starting to use Twitter to manipulate opinion; trying to force particular topics onto the “breaking list”. If I’m behind the curve on this, who is covering this kind of stuff about Twitter use and abuse and the likely future threats to Twitter’s value? I’m certainly going to be a lot more reluctant to consider the breaking meme listing, knowing that it may be being manipulated without apparent oversight or action.

Some of these are clearly spamming – the two different accounts at the break in the screenshots are obviously related and identical postings – operated by a common source, I suspect. Some appear to be fairly normal accounts, though I didn’t go looking for other plagiarism, it is possible that they may have been systematically ReTweeting without attribution.

Summary

It appears that Twitter is definitely reaching an importance level that means we can expect results to become affected. I know I’ve seen manipulation of trends, but I’d understood until very recently that this was mostly larking about. It could have been test runs to exercise a promotional network and demonstrate to likely buyers that the service would work.

Attribution, always an important topic for search engines, is even more important for social networking. Its part of trusting your news sources. Seeing this has damaged, for me, trust in the Twitter service.

If you tend to the dark side, along with spamming Google, spamming and plagiarism on Twitter probably are part of your mix, or will be.

As an ordinary user, I can’t see any sanction other than to report spamming; but it looked to me as if many of these people were otherwise just ordinary joes. Account closure for minor bouts of overenthusiasm seems harsh.

Updates

Danny Sullivan finally catches up with ReTweeting, misattributed and malattributred Twitter spam. (I’m joking – I got there earlier, he got there in more depth – good article).

The big ones, according to TwitStat, are TweetDeck and Twhirl. Both Adobe AIR applications. Neither of them has a proper Publisher ID and both want Unrestricted access to my machine. I’m not installing unidentified applications with unrestricted access. Too easy to transform to malware.

Anyone know of a Twitter desktop client for the Mac, with an identified publisher certification of reasonable security, and limitations on access to my system? Or will Twitter stay a mobile phone application for me, where I can restrict the access to sensitive resources?