I have been fond of saying that the best corporate social media presence doesn't mean anything if it isn't backed up by systems that can do something with the information learned.
On the other hand, if you don't have a social media presence, you aren't going to learn anything.
For example, let's take the @Buzztime Twitter account. It monitors all things Buzztime, as I recently discovered. But recently it caught something important - a Buzztime subscriber that, for whatever reason, wasn't providing Buzztime to its customers.
David Graham, Twitter account @translucentd, advertises himself as a "trivia geek" (among other things). On April 28, he tweeted:
Trying to play @Buzztime at the local BW3 and 2nd week in a row no network connection #boo
It took a couple of days (April 28 was a Saturday), but @Buzztime eventually picked up the tweet and replied.
@TranslucentD Are you playing on your mobile playmaker?
This is a good question, by the way, because mobile playmakers sometimes lose connections - something I just encountered earlier this week when my "Jim Morrison" answer didn't go through. (I solved the problem by temporarily turning off wi-fi and using the cellular connection instead.)
Graham replied:
@Buzztime I tried both, the problem is that it doesn't appear the location is connected to the network. No national scores or game.
Buzztime then asked:
@TranslucentD What is the name of the location?
Graham's reply:
@Buzztime Buffalo Wild Wings in Fenton, Michigan
Since the tweet was out there for everyone to see, I got curious about the site. You see, if you go to the Buzztime.com website, you can see the game history for every game at every site. This is useful, for example, to see if anyone ever plays Lunchtime Trivia at a particular site you want to visit. It also helps to discover whether a restaurant has closed.
And it can also tell you if there's some type of problem with the Buzztime network connection. For example, if you go to the Buzztime web page for Fenton's Buffalo Wild Wings and look at the Buzztime Trivia game history, this is what you see (at least as of May 2):
Now I'll admit that I don't know if Buzztime has tried to contact the Fenton BWW to find out what's going on. But at least they're now aware of the problem.
And a question for David Graham - how far is Grand Blanc from Fenton?
