Are you a public relations professional in the mobile industry?

Are you a public relations professional in the mobile industry?

If so, congratulations for recognising that it’s worth checking out what people are writing about in the UK and beyond — because what might only be a rant about how stupid Starbucks are for allowing T-Mobile to charge obscene wifi access rates, that rant is being syndicated by numerous feeds, databases and services all across the world. It’s commented, referred, trackbacked, printed out and read by an undefined amount of people.

I had a look thru the posts this month — this will be my 25th post mentioning T-Mobile — and often, the articles might be a billion miles away from anything that could be defined as flattering.

Looking through my stats, of the people I can track (since my feed is syndicated in full, freely, everywhere, I can only track readers hitting the site or the feed directly) just under 40,000 have read my array of T-Mobile rants, news and viewpoints this month — without any sort of come back from T-Mobile. It’s this that I find fascinating. At what stage does the operator engage with it’s communities of users?

I get a ton of questions from people on all sorts of subjects. A colleague emailed me this week to ask if the T-Mobile data plan was available on Pay as you go. I didn’t quite know. I’m embarrassed to say that I phoned up T-Mobile’s customer support and asked’em. I eventually found a page on their site giving some details, but not enough for me to comprehensively answer my colleague’s enquiry. I had to make a stupid phone call, wait in a queue, run through the identification questions and… phew… 5 minutes later, get my question answered by a human. Really, really, really annoying.

It’s just not good enough.

Why isn’t there a T-Mobile UK blog written by a full time blogger whose job it is to publicise and engage with T-Mobile customers (and wannabe customers) online? I want to be able to email the chap or lady with a question. I want that question answered reasonably quickly. I want to be able to give permission to have it put on the T-Mobile blog so that it’s out there in the web’s consciousness — so the next person with that query can do a quick google and get the answer.

I want to follow what the blogger is writing. I want to be led. LED! I’m a customer! I want to know what’s going on. I want some sort of editorialised guide as to how I can give T-Mobile MORE money.

I want the blogger to do a week long feature on using T-Mobile abroad.

I want the blogger to admit that the T-Mobile range of handsets is often pathetic — and I want him to yank the Head of Handsets chappie on to the blog to do an interview to explain WHY and what’s coming.

I want to read about T-Mobile’s public strategy.

I want to read thoughts and opinion from T-Mobile’s team. I want them humanised.

I want to be quoting stuff that the T-Mobile blogger is writing here on SMS Text News.

I want the key announcements to put stuck on the T-Mobile blog at the same time as the press releases… but with a bit o’ spin from the blogger. I want opinion. Excitement. Energy.

Most of all, I want to be led.

Right now, I make it all up.

One moment I’m in Starbucks almost exploding with annoyance at their hotspot pricing. Next moment I’m beaming with excitement at their unlimited data plan. Next moment I’m wondering if I’m an idiot for using a service whose call quality simply doesn’t appear to be a patch on Vodafone.

I’d like T-Mobile to recognise that blogging isn’t a side game played by 9 year olds. That it’s not just a paragraph in their monthly marketing report. It’s the opportunity to directly interact with their customers and potential customers. There’s still a huge place for above the line traditional marketing — but there’s an evergrowing online, disperate following, who are — in the absence of any action or attention from T-Mobile — getting on with it themselves.

I’m willing to bet that a double digit percentage of UK readers to SMS Text News would seriously consider swapping to T-Mobile if there was a T-Mobile representative interacting on this site, doing Q&A interviews, shooting down in flames some of the points I’m making — and genuinely participating in the excitement that everyone working in mobile feels (some more than others).

I’m willing to bet that if I did a blog interview with (an imaginary) Sophie, Blog Rep for T-Mobile, about her mobile preferences and so on — which contained a line ‘but hey, look, if you’re having trouble with your supplier, or you’d really like to try out the T-Mobile web ‘n walk plan, just drop me an email and I’ll get you transferred to us’ — Sophie would receive atleast one or two mails a day, if not a small avalanche of enquiries.

If ‘Sophie’ was a regular contributer — if you saw her commenting on a post about Orange, or about a new handset coming out — you’d warm to her. You’d read her blog. You’d see her on MobHappy or MoCoNews — you’d read her comments on 160characters, and you’d see Tomi mentioning her in his frequent thoughtpieces about the industry. She’d be at the networking meetings. She’d occasionally be on TV presenting the T-Mobile message. She’d be quoted in newspapers and magazines. Quickly she’d need to introduce Clive and Melanie as co-Blog Reps, to help manage. Clive might handle MySpace whilst Melanie handle mobile tech blogs.

T-Mobile would quickly garner substantial goodwill and influence. The waves of consumers searching for information on the company would pick up on it. Before you know it, Sophie would need a team of people around her to help her handle and manage the enquiries. Not a problem though — each enquiry has a potential direct dollar value on it (in terms of subscriptions, sales and so on).

And of course, whilst I’ve used T-Mobile for this example, the same applies to any other organisation — be it Sony, Apple, Nokia, o2, BT or Carphone Warehouse.

If Dell’s doing something like this, why can’t these companies?

Nice to dream a little, eh?